Taiwanese manufacturers of graphics cards, namely CP Technology, Gigabyte Technology, LeadTek Research and Prolink Microsystems, announced their financial results for March. At this time the companies who manufacture Powered by ATI graphics cards are really ahorse and reported healthy sequential revenue growth, while Prolink and LeadTek either reported nearly flat or negative increase.

Gigabyte’s graphics cards sales rose 36.4%, while CP Technologies proclaimed 45.9% growth of revenue in March over February. Meanwhile, in the so-called NVIDIA camp, LeadTek’s sales of graphics cards declined 5.7% sequentially and 12.1% annually, while Prolink’s results grew 6.2% in March compared to February, but fell 14.4% compared to March 2002. We also noted on Saturday that MSI’s sales of graphics cards were unbelievably weak in March, while ASUS’ sales of graphics cards also stayed on not so high level.

Gigabyte earned $5.6 million selling its graphics cards last month, while CP Technology’s sales were $12.16 million (still 1.2% down from 2002!), according to DigiTimes. The source does not indicate whether it includes all CP’s divisions, such as PowerColor, PowerMate and PowerIA, however, even if it does, it looks like the revenue increase was mainly driven by sales of graphics cards. LeadTek’s revenue achieved $11.03 million and Prolink’s figure slightly exceeded $6.92 million.

Based on this report from Taiwanese sources we can also think about ATI’s and NVIDIA’s business in the ongoing quarter. March is the first month of the third quarter in ATI Technologies’ fiscal 2003. Considering the fact about sales bump of ATI’s AIB partners we can also expect ATI’s own revenue to grow this quarter compared to the previous one. This will only be effective in case the company continues to supply enough graphics processors and even increase its shipments in its Q3 of fiscal 2002. Note that the company itself predicted its revenue for the ongoing quarter to stay in the range of $300 million, so, it will be a good surprise for its shareholders in case the expectation is exceeded. NVIDIA started to ramp up the production of its GeForce FX 5200 GPU in March, as a result, its sales as well as the market share quite naturally decreased a bit. They should rebound throughout April and May, however, the second part of June as well as July is not going to be a good time for graphics cards makers since Intel unveils its new Corporate Stable i865G chipset with integrated graphics core what is likely to affect sales of discrete solutions. NVIDIA’s first quarter of fiscal 2004 ends in a couple of weeks and given that sales in February are seasonally not really good, while March sales were unexpectedly weak, we would suppose that the company’s sales and may be below expectations or even fall into losses this quarter based on the expectation that the company planned to increase its R&D investments.