14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that makers of motherboards are not the only ones suffering revenue drops, as January is proving to be quite the harsh mistress even to memory maker A-Data Technology.
As end-users know, the first quarter of any year is usually slower overall, as far as sales are concerned.
Basically, the consumer market doesn't yield as high a number of sales as in the fourth quarter of the previous year because of the holiday shopping season, which leaves many customers unwilling to buy more things for a while.
This year, however, motherboard makers are suffering from an extra unfortunate development, that being the now infamous Intel Cougar Point chipset flaw.
Sales are expected to be affected quite visibly, to the point where ASUS and Gigabyte, among others, are already seeing revenue decline.
A-Data, being a supplier of memory chips, won't suffer from this overmuch, but it still reported a sales drop during January.
For DRAM modules, sales fell by 12.95% sequentially, leading to NT$944 million, while NAND Flash and other non-DRAM products reached NT$1.86 million (6.5% less on month).
In terms of share, sales of SSD (solid state drive) and external hard drives accounted for more than 10% of the total revenues.
Meanwhile, the entirety of non-DRAM products accounted for 66.3% of all revenues last month, which is a fair bit more than last year's 50%.
For those that want actual numbers, January 2011 revenues were NT$2.8 billion, the equivalent of US$97 million.
This is 24.1% lower than last year's NT$3.69 billion and 8.8% less than those of December, 2010.
Moving forward, A-Data expects to do better and better as semiconductors start to recover in terms of average selling prices.
Smartphones and tablets should lead to an increase in embedded memory demand, meaning higher NAND Prices, and overall sales and finances should recover by the end of the first half of 2011.