14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the month of February, 2011 is proving to have been less than favorable for pretty much ever IT market segment out there, and for companies in particular, in this case motherboard manufacturers.
As some end-users may or may not know, the first quarter of every year is generally known as the slow season, financially at least.
This is because the consumer base is mostly unwilling to buy too many products after going through the winter holiday shopping season.
As such, sales of PCs, consumer electronics and any sort of hardware usually drop in this period.
In addition to this, there is another cause behind companies' less than stellar financial performances.
That is the fact that the month of February has fewer working days that all others in the year, implying fewer shipments and, thus, revenues.
This is exactly what happened to motherboard makers ASUS, Pegatron, MSI and Gigabyte, among others, according to Digitimes.
Gigabyte, for one, went through a monthly revenue drop of 45.36% and an on-year decline of 34.68% in February, which means it made NT$2.74 billion. Combined January-February sum is NT$7.74 billion.
Pegatron also went through a rough time, sliding down by 31.7% on month and 34% on year, to NT$19.95 billion (January-February performance was NT$49.17 billion, 23.3% less on-year).
Meanwhile, MSI reported a January-February sum of NT$11.86 billion, meaning 16.47% less than last year. The February figure was of NT$4.96 billion (less 28.25% on month and 27.79% on year).
Finally, ASUS experienced an on-year decline of 20.91% during the first two months of 2011, ending up with the sum of NT$34.08 billion. This was achieved after revenues of NT$14.22 billion (US$484.25 million) for February (28.38% and 30.28% down on month and on year, respectively).
This year, the sharp decreases were also partially caused by the whole problem involving Intel's defective 6-series Cougar point chipset.