The big four brands shipped 30% fewer motherboards in 2022 than 2021, according to Taiwan's Digitimes. Overall, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock shipments fell from 44.5 million to 31.5 million.
ASRock was the worst hit according to Digitimes (via Tom's Hardware), falling from around six million units in 2021 to 2.7 million in 2022, a precipitous drop of 55%. MSI took a pretty big knock, too, falling from 9.5 to 5.5 million units, or 42% down.
The two biggest brands, Asus and Gigabyte, were somewhat more resilient. Asus dropped 25% from 18 million to 13.6 million, while Gigabyte fared best sliding by 14% from 11 million motherboards in 2021 to 9.5 million in 2022.
It's not clear without diving behind Digitime's paywall whether either Intel or AMD board shipments were particularly badly hit over the other. Reportedly, all of the big brands are expecting to at least match their 2022 performance in 2023 or better it, so the tide is perhaps turning.
Of course, this shouldn't come as terribly surprising news. We reported last week on data from Mercury Research showing that the CPU market downturn at the end of 2022 was the worst the outfit had seen in 30 years of tracking sales data.
As ever, all of this data is somewhat laggy and doesn't reflect what is happening right now. In a recent earnings call, AMD's Lisa Su was upbeat about market prospects for 2023 and particularly the latter half of the year.
So, it's not necessarily all doom and gloom for the future. But it's becoming increasingly clear that 2022 was an annus horribilis on pretty much every level for the tech sector and for the PC hardware market specifically.
