As laconically, as it has never been, VIA Technologies today announced net sales for February 2003. No comments from the company’s officials were issued about another serious slash in sales both sequentially and annually.

Revenues for February 2003 achieved $49.92 million approximately, a substantial 17.72% decrease over January's figure $60.67 million and about 24.67% less that during the same period a year before. It seems that current reductions in revenues were caused by a lot of factors, including strengthening competition between VIA and NVIDIA on the Socket A market, as well as VIA’s presently weak positions on the Socket 478 front. In addition, VIA recently began to concentrate on non-core-logic-related products, such as multimedia chips and peripheral controllers, which price is considerably lower compared to the cost of chipsets for mainboards.

VIA sales have been decreasing for the second consecutive year and it does not seem that they are going to improve considerably in the first half. NVIDIA is very aggressive on the Socket A market, while given that this market shrinks at the moment and the Athlon 64 processors were postponed till September, I assume that VIA’s share of the chipset market is likely to decrease, at least, in the first half. Since VIA was the most influential producer of AMD CPUs-supporting chipsets, its market share in the mentioned marketplace plays a very important role in the Taipei, Taiwan-based company’s sales.