Taiwan server shipment forecast and industry analysis, 2016

Taiwan server players' revenues from products including server motherboards, servers, storage and related network equipment, continued to enjoy growth on year to surpass NT$500 billion in 2015.

As for worldwide server shipments, thanks to a strong performance in the fourth quarter of 2015, the volume rose 9.8% on year to reach 11.08 million units (motherboard) in 2015. Datacenter server shipments will continue to grow strongly on year in 2016 thanks to rising demand from the cloud computing market, while shipments from traditional server brand vendors are expected to increase slightly on year, helping overall worldwide server shipments to grow by 5.9% on year in 2016. Digitimes Research expects server shipments to have a chance to grow significantly after Intel releases its next-generation Purley platform in the second quarter of 2017.

With growing demand from the cloud computing market, Taiwan's server shipments grew 12.5% on year to break 10 million units in 2015, accounting for 90.7% of worldwide shipments and the percentage is expected to grow to 91.1% in 2016. Inventec, Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry), Wistron and Quanta Computer are the top-4 server ODMs in Taiwan, but their combined share in Taiwan's server shipments dropped on year in 2015 as major server brand vendors such as Dell, distributed their orders to other ODMs to lower their risks. However, the share is expected to rise in 2016.