Core Tip: The market has already seen manufacturers "grab orders regardless of cost" for commercial laptops, which affects the operation of brands such as Acer and Asus, and will also impact the future of chip manufacturers such as Elan, which mainly focus on the laptop market.
The consumer notebook market is sure to fall into recession this year. The industry originally expected the commercial market to maintain its fundamentals, but now it is hard to escape the impact. The market has already seen the situation that manufacturers are "grabbing orders regardless of cost" for commercial laptops, which affects the operation of brand factories such as Acer and Asus, and will also impact the market outlook of chip factories such as Elan, which mainly focus on the laptop market.
The global demand for commercial notebook orders has weakened, which can be seen from the recent outlook of Inventec, a major foundry. Inventec predicts that notebook computers in the third quarter will be flat or slightly down compared with the previous quarter, mainly due to better shipments of commercial notebook computers in the first half of the year, but due to the impact of global inflation and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the second half of the year, customers are more conservative in buying goods.
Inventec's notebook customers are mainly Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell (DELL), of which commercial notebooks account for more than 70%. According to the analysis of foreign investment in the United States, since the middle of 2021, the demand for consumer notebooks has begun to weaken, but the demand for commercial notebooks has remained strong. However, Inventec's outlook for the second half of the year is significantly different from the traditional peak season in the past.
In addition, Dell, which focuses on commercial notebooks, cut orders for notebooks and monitor panels in the third quarter of this year.
Brand factories have concentrated heavily on the commercial market, which has also resulted in a significant increase in price pressure. Acer originally hoped that the operation of the Pan-Asia region in the second half of the year would be supported by the strong demand from the commercial market. Now, it believes that the commercial business in the second half of the year will weaken and the performance will not be as good as that in the first half of the year.
Hou Zhiyuan, general manager of Acer's Asia Pacific Operations Headquarters and Taiwan Region, said frankly that his peers are looking to the commercial market. In the past, commercial orders "can be sold without marketing", but now it can be said to return to the normal situation in 2019.
