PC market will be saturated chip manufacturers optimistic about the mobile business

According to a report from a well-known foreign analysts recently, the world’s top five notebook makers (HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, and Dell)’s product shipments in November 2012 fell by 4% compared to October.

Among them, the shipments of Hewlett-Packard Co. and Acer Inc., which slumped in October, all had a stable performance in November. Hewlett-Packard also completed a small increase in the volume of shipments of other manufacturers. In November, Asustek was the biggest supplier of the decline in shipments due to the sluggish sales of Windows 8 PCs.

On the other hand, in the top five notebook ODM vendors, Compal became the only vendor to achieve shipment growth in November. Of the manufacturers whose shipments have fallen, Wistron and Heshuo have reduced their shipment volume to less than 10%, while Quanta and Inventec have fallen by more than 10%. Taken together, the total shipments of the top three and top five ODM manufacturers fell by about 7% and 10% respectively from the previous month.

At the same time, as the PC market becomes more saturated, Eric Lin, another senior analyst from Digitimes, brought us future product strategy analysis for chip makers.

Eric Lin pointed out that traditional x86 processor manufacturers have started to maintain their long-term interests by entering the mobile and server space. Recently, AMD has announced that it will carry out research and development of ARM-based processors. In addition, Intel is also actively deploying its mobile chip business after acquiring the GPU technology license from ZiiLabs, an innovative wholly-owned subsidiary.

For the ARM company of origin mobile, although Windows RT did not achieve the expected success after its launch, the operating system is undoubtedly a key factor for the ARM platform to enter the PC field. Currently, ARM has hired IC design and software. Developers to promote their own server applications, in addition to AMD's partnership can also make it a lot of road into the server market.