There are two words that nobody wants to hear at any time, and when we say nobody, it means nobody: crisis and inflation. There is a saying that “rough seas, fishermen gain”, but that only applies if one of the two words does not go alone and unaccompanied. The scenario that arises in PC does not look good at all and is that sales begin to fall while investment seems out of control according to the latest news. We may be on the edge of the precipice and not know it, so we have to ask ourselves: Is there crisis and inflation in the sector PC for shipments?
COVID-19 changed everything, it changed our minds, it changed our habits, it changed the semiconductor sector and now after two years we are beginning to understand that it has left consequences that can be devastating depending on the case. Regarding the PC, a new report from Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Devices Tracker made by IDC they show a reality that many will not like and on which it is necessary to reflect.
The drop in PC shipments, the global situation and the crisis
We are going to play many sticks in this article to be able to put everything in context, but there are two clear references as a basis: said IDC report that we saw yesterday and the new expansion of Intel’s FAB through investment to comply with the company’s roadmap. And it is that if we look at the report we can see that shipments have fallen no less than a 5.1% so far this year, despite the fact that they launched more than 80 million pcswhich is the seventh consecutive month in which this barrier has been overcome, a milestone in the industry.
But what goes up must come down, and unsurprisingly demand from the education and consumer PC markets has slowed, but at the same time there is a curious trend: the laptop market is down quite a bit, while desktop PCs are up slightly.
Briefly analyzing the report, what we can infer is that users are not buying at the same level as before, companies have slowed down their investment in technology and the world scenario is slowing down due to the uncontrolled inflation in which we are involved and that seems not finish.
Intel invests $3 billion more in its Ohio FAB
After the plans to land in Europe, Intel announces a billion dollar investment in its FAB D1X in Ohio to increase by 20% the size of said factory with the aim of developing state-of-the-art silicon processing technology where the workforce is increased to 22,000 employees.
If we take into account what was seen in the IDC report and we also know that markets as powerful as that of smartphones are in the doldrums with sales falling and where only the automobile sector is demanding more volume, added to the withdrawal of manufacturers of chips such as graphics cards (complete stagnation of sales) we feel like the question: are we facing a collapse of the semiconductor sector due to very optimistic forecasts?
Russia’s war in Ukraine does not seem close to ending and even if it did today, the economic and social consequences will be felt for many months and it is possible that the conflict will not end there due to the decision of hitherto neutral countries to enter the NATO. If analysts’ forecasts of semiconductor market demand fail, investments stall and go unfulfilled, the impact on the supply chain will be devastating.
People are not spending because of the economic period that we live in and that awaits us, uncontrolled investment with already unrealistic forecasts, China paralyzed by Omicron and the supply chain doing overtime while chips accumulate on the shelves with an automobile sector that demands more and more from manufacturers but sees how the transition to electric smells like a catastrophe due to high car prices? what awaits us?
Whoever knows how the market will behave surely has a lot to gain, but the rest smacks of an imminent debacle if there is not an effective paradigm shift that guides everything, and today that seems more than complicated and the semiconductor crisis may seem a bad joke with what is coming, not for supply, but for prices. A crisis that could be triggered by PC shipments, ironic the less seen the seen.
