14 DAY TRIAL // The tale of low PC sales has long been touted as an Intel issue that prevented strong Skylake sales in the first months since the processor came out. Apparently, a recent study shows that all this was deliberately made to help Skylake sell better since August.
Many analysts believed that sales of the Skylake are hindered by existing stocks of previous Haswells, but this wasn't the case. According to a report from Tech Trader Daily, Intel significantly reduced shipments of its central processing units in the first half of the year, to leave PC maker inventories drained and empty.
This process is nothing unusual since Intel needed to have all its PC makers and retailers with empty enough stocks in order to fill them up quickly with new Skylake models in August and make sure it sells them without any hiccups. In fact, the plan worked so well that the first stocks of Skylakes quickly evaporated and the first supply gaps appeared between the months of August and September, with Intel quickly assuring its customers that new Skylake batches will return in stores as fast as possible.
Intel handles the PC industry like it owns it
The American company usually has a cycle of unit buildups in the first half of a financial year and then a controlled drain of units in the second half. This practice helps PC makers and retailers build systems in the first half and then sell them bundled without being compromised by stand-alone units selling alongside them at a higher pace in the second.
However, this time Intel launched the Skylake in the second half of the year, August onwards, so the cycle has been interrupted. This will mean a low supply of Skylakes in the first half of 2016. So you better grab your Skylakes now as long you find them on shelves.
This current situation seems to be helping Intel a lot financially, since PC makers mainly build their systems on Skylakes at the moment, and even supply is low due to hype and transport delays, its prices remain high and gives Intel the incentive to keep its price this way, earning massive amounts of money. A full transition to Skylake will probably happen in winter, but the ongoing process at the moment gives Intel the much-needed money to financially buffer a slowdown in sales next spring.