by Anton Shilov
09/03/2002 | 08:04 PM
The Fall is coming and the industry awakes from its sleep. In August both Taiwan-based core logic developers saw their shipments climbing up as their partners among mainboard manufacturers started to receive orders from PC-vendors that are preparing for the seasonal rise in demand.
VIA reported approximately $56.28 million revenue for August 2002, 6.4% increase from July. Apparently, the company has not reached its target of $58.26% for this month. They say that more positive results were achieved due to the early roll-out of KT400 core logic for Socket A platforms since the rivals SiS and NVIDIA still cannot present their competing products. Although Pentium 4 chipsets from VIA continue to be quite unpopular among mainboard makers, their Socket A share expands. The company said that their third quarter sales are going to be higher compared to the previous quarter (see this news-story). Several industry sources reported that VIA KT400 rebates are lower than the chipset-maker offered with the KT266A, hence, we should expect their gross margin to improve as well.<%BANNER[article]%>
Luckily, VIA’s Eden platform and C3 processors are now adopted by several companies all around the world. For instance, last week NEXCOM introduced their new range of dynamic network appliance boxes based on the VIA Eden Platform (see this news-story), also, US-based Microtel Computer Systems, has chosen the C3 processor along with the PLE133 integrated chipset for its new low-price models, the Microtel SYSMAR710, SYSMAR715, SYSMAR150 and SYSMAR151. Of course, both C3 and Eden are far from being really popular and widely recognised, but they also play an important role in VIA’s future.
SiS posted nearly $37.9 million sales for the month passed, up 17.6% compared to July, and created a new sales record in the company’s history. They also expect this figure to increase in September as Intel has just lowered the Pentium 4 CPU pricing, thus, the demand on microprocessors and mainboards is going to rise. Nevertheless, it is too early to talk about SiS profit margin, considering that a large part of their shipments are SiS650 integrated chipsets that are sold very cheaply and do not bring enough profit for the company.