Gigabyte Technology Co Ltd (技嘉), a leading supplier of motherboards and graphics cards, is forecast to see lower profitability in the second quarter, due to a decline in shipments and graphics cards prices as the cryptocurrency mining frenzy gradually abates, Capital Investment Management Corp (群益投顧) said last week.
Cryptocurrency mining continues to suffer from tighter security and regulatory measures around the world, with bitcoin’s price having dropped about 55 percent this year, Bloomberg News said, citing the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange.
“The prices of major cryptocurrencies have plunged after peaking in early 2018 ... leading to persistently lower demand for cryptocurrency mining and for Gigabyte graphics card shipments, which decreased somewhat since the beginning of the second quarter,” Capital Investment said in a note on Thursday last week.
Gigabyte’s revenues reached about NT$5 billion (US$163.9 million) in April and again in May, notably lower than March’s NT$8.5 billion, and its second-quarter revenues could be less than in the first quarter, Capital Investment said.
“In our opinion, as the average selling price of graphics cards is expected to edge down, the second-quarter gross margin could underperform quarter-on-quarter,” the investment advisory firm said.
Gigabyte shipped 1.2 million graphics cards in the first quarter and the company said that shipments could see a quarterly decline of 20 percent in the second quarter, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported on Wednesday.
The company shipped between 300,000 and 350,000 graphics card units in April and again in May, compared with 450,000 in March, the report said.
Sales from motherboards accounted for 49 percent of Gigabyte’s total sales in the first quarter, followed by graphics cards at 36 percent and servers at 15 percent, the newspaper quoted company spokesman K.J. Sun (孫國仁) as saying at an investors’ conference.
The proportion of sales from graphics cards would drop quarterly in the second quarter, while sales from motherboards and servers would increase, Sun said, without elaborating.
In the second half this year, the company is expecting Nvidia Corp’s planned launch of its new family of Volta graphics processing units (GPUs) to bolster graphics card sales, he said.
However, demand for graphics cards in the next few quarters might not be as robust as the company expects, despite the rapid development of the e-sports industry, Capital Investment said.
It is rumored that Nvidia’s inventory of old GPUs remains high and the launch of the new GPU model might be postponed until September or even the fourth quarter, while Intel Corp might also delay the launch of its new Cannon Lake chip, Capital Investment said.
“Gigabyte’s revenue and earnings in the second half this year could be negatively affected,” it said.
Gigabyte shares on Friday rose 3.22 percent to NT$67.4 in Taipei trading. It reported that its sales for the first five months of the year rose 40.34 percent year-on-year to NT$30.53 billion.
The company saw its shares fall 14.25 percent last month, mirroring broad-based declines among local motherboard and graphics card makers in light of the weaker demand for products used in cryptocurrency mining and the delayed launch of Nvidia’s Volta GPU.
WALKING AWAY: At one point the world’s No. 3 smartphone brand, LG has fallen from a position as a market leader after a series of software and hardware mishaps South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc is to wind down its loss-making mobile division after failing to find a buyer, a move that would make it the first major smartphone brand to completely withdraw from the market. Its decision to pull out will leave its 10 percent share in North America, where it is the No. 3 brand, to be gobbled up by Samsung Electronics Co and Apple Inc with its domestic rival expected to have the edge. “In the United States, LG has targeted mid-priced — if not ultra-low — models and that means Samsung, which has more mid-priced product lines than
SPECULATION: The integrated house and land transaction income tax has been amended as the real-estate market heats up because of high liquidity and low interest rates Lawmakers across party lines yesterday agreed to July 1 as the provisional date on which a draft amendment to the Income Tax Act (所得稅法) is to come into effect, with the aim of curbing real-estate speculation. The consensus was reached following interparty negotiations at the legislature’s Finance Committee to determine when revisions to the “integrated house and land transaction income tax” would take effect. The committee on Monday last week passed a number of revisions to the act, but failed to agree on when they would take effect. Under the proposed revisions, the tax would be set at 45 percent
TAICHUNG PLANT: An official said that generator No. 3 had been retrofitted and it generates 0.46g of particulate pollution per kilowatt-hour, down from 0.6g to 0.7g A spike in demand for electricity made it necessary to restart the third coal-fired generator at the Taichung Power Plant, Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) said yesterday as a feud with the Taichung City Government lingers. Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) has sought to keep the generator from being used. In 2019, he revoked Taipower’s license to operate the generator. However, the state-run utility has taken the city government to court over the license revocation and won the case in February last year, Taipower manager Chang Ting-shu (張廷抒) said. “We would like to remind the Taichung City Government that operation of the third
Several hundred people have already booked their tickets and begun training for a spectacular voyage: a few minutes, or perhaps days, in the weightlessness of space. The mainly wealthy first-time space travelers are preparing to take part in one of several private missions which are preparing to launch. The era of space tourism is on the horizon 60 years after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space. Two companies, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin LLC, are building spacecraft capable of sending private clients on suborbital flights to the edge of space lasting several minutes. Glenn King is the director of
RSS