14 DAY TRIAL // VIA kept its financial report for the month of August 2012 very brief, unlike other companies who go into every detail about what and why happened. Unfortunately, this didn't make the announcement any less serious.
Net sales somehow managed to drop by 22.90%, compared to the same month of the previous year, while January through August returned a drop of 24.22% on year.
Meanwhile, sales revenue was 14.5 % month-on-month lower. The sum was NT$ 246 million, which corresponds to US$8.22 million / 6.48 million Euro.
Quite a bit lower than the NT$287.74 million (US$9.61 million / 7.58 million Euro) gathered during the month of July 2012.
Seeing these numbers makes us think sadly to the days when VIA was a maker of processors and, more importantly, chipsets on par with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Of course, at the time, NVIDIA was in the game as well, with its nForce core-logic, so the playing field was more evenly spread out, compared to today's duopoly.
Currently, VIA only makes power efficient x86 processor platforms, like the EPIA-P910 Pico-ITX motherboard released yesterday.
Equipped with a quad-core NANO E-Series CPU, as well as the VIA VX11H MSP (media system processor), the product has all it needs to serve healthcare, logistics and fleet management applications.
We also can't forget about the $49 Android Mini PC, a sort of foil to the Raspberry Pi, and one that may have been part of the reason why a new revision has been made.
Basically, VIA has everything it needs to keep its spot on the market, even if it can't increase it by any relevant margin, so it is surprising, and disheartening, to see that it is slipping. Hopefully this is just a temporary lapse in customer interest, rather than a sign of what will come.