Taiwan-based designers of core-logic sets who control more than 25% of the whole market, once again reported revenue declines in monthly sales. Reasons for sliding revenues are not mentioned officially, but the background for the current financial situation for both companies are inability to supply high-end PCI Express chipsets, increasing competition in the entry-level market segment and some other factors.

VIA Technologies’ net sales for November, 2004, were $47.42 million approximately, which is a 17.49% decrease over October’s figure of $57.48 million and a 7.96% decline over the $51.52 million in November, 2003. Silicon Integrated Systems managed to improve its core chipset business during the month, but still not enough to report higher sequential sales: in November and December the company posted sales of NT$1.081 and NT$1.080 billion (about $33 million) respectively (due to US dollar drop, December’s revenue in US dollars is higher compared to November’s sales results).

Chipset business of companies like VIA, SiS and ATI, who supply the majority of their core-logic products for PCs running Intel Pentium 4 processors, is believed to be under fire, as Intel Corp. competes fiercely in the entry-level and mainstream chipset market segments, which puts pricing pressure on third-party core-logic makers. Furthermore, due to rising Centrino success, third-party chipset designers may also face declining mobile core-logic sales, as notebook makers are obliged to use Intel Pentium M or Celeron M processors along with Intel’s WLAN and core-logic solutions to mark their PCs as Centrino.

Recently both VIA Technologies and Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. started to ship chipsets supporting PCI Express interconnection for different platforms, including Intel Pentium 4 and AMD64. It is unclear, whether the supplies positively affect revenues for December, but earlier this year it was believed that the absence of innovative high-performance chipsets affected revenues of SiS and VIA negatively.

Officials from VIA and SiS usually do not comment on financial results and the background to press.