China-based smartphone brands shipped a total of 195 million phones in fourth-quarter 2021 as they aggressively ramped up shipments in the traditional high season in an attempt to make their whole-year target.

Fourth-quarter 2021 smartphone AP shipments to China-based vendors amounted to 171.2 million units, plunging 30.8% from the prior quarter mainly as China-based vendors faced the situation where some components were in worse shortage than the others, on top of weak 5G phone demand and a mismatch between AP supply and demand.

Global tablet shipments amounted to 37.13 million units in fourth-quarter 2021, up 5.4% from the prior quarter but down 20.2% from the prior year, as the tablet market continued to struggle with the IC shortage and the shipments came short of expectation in the traditional high season.

Fourth-quarter 2021 global server shipments grew 2.9% sequentially. IC and component shortages continue to haunt the server industry in the first quarter of 2022.

Taiwan's notebook shipments enjoyed better-than-expected growths in the fourth quarter of 2021, picking up over 10% sequentially, stronger than the 9% of the global average.

The China-based top-4 smartphone brands - Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and Honor - together shipped 509 million phones in 2021, among which 5G ones represented about 50%.

Global smartphone shipments in the second half of 2021 did not see a growth momentum as in the first half and had experienced decline in both quarters of the period amid the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising concerns over a potential inflation.

Japanese automakers make their way into Southeast Asia at their own pace. Toyota with abundant corporate resources started out by building multiple assembly lines in several countries across the region while gradually undertaking localized components production and exports business.

Taiwan-based makers' server-related revenues grew 7.1% on year to reach NT$1.65 trillion in 2021, outperforming that of shipments, which was only 4.5%.

Taiwan-based manufacturers' revenues generated from server-related businesses including motherboards, complete systems as well as network communication and storage hardware and software are estimated to have grown 7.1% year-over-year to reach NT$1.65 trillion in 2021.

Digitimes Research believes 2021 were a fruitful year for the global foundry industry thanks to strong order momentum and is optimistic about its outlook going into 2022.

According to Digitimes Research's statistics and analyses, the 2021 global server market has a supply-demand gap as large cloud service operators step up orders to meet the pandemic-driven demand for cloud services, WFH and online services but the IC and component shortage disrupts shipment schedules.