The recent 18 months have not been really successful for VIA Technologies, while the latest quarter was a rather negative for the former number one chipset maker on the planet. During the last three months it became clear that VIA Technologies needs official license on Intel’s Quad Pumped Bus as well as an advanced Socket A chipset. At this point the company ramps up the production of its new chipsets and expects its sales to ramp up soon.

As we know, currently VIA has its KT600 ready to go in mass production in order to fight NVIDIA’s nForce2-series as well as SiS’ SiS748. The KT400A has not become a really successful product so far and will hardly become in future. As a result, the company does not put a lot of hopes on it. The KT600 looks promising enough to become a nice solution and it is quite natural that VIA expects the chipset to boost its sales in July and August.

VIA’s currently premier PT800 core-logic for Intel Pentium 4 processors is also ramping up in production at the moment. It will be in full commercial production sometime in July or August. It will compete against SiS648FX as well as lower-cost Intel’s chipsets. Given that the PT800 is in full production only in July, I expect VIA PT880 to appear sometime after Computex Taipei 2003, in September, or even in October.

Talking about VIA’s DeltaChrome graphics processors, I remember that S3 Graphics, a VIA’s subsidiary, will become available only in September or even in the fourth quarter of the year, hence, do not expect these graphics processors to impact on VIA’s sales in short-term.

Given hazy prospects of AMD Athlon 64 processors this year, we cannot comment on VIA’s Socket 754 chipset sales this September or October.

All in all, June is very likely to be a hard month for VIA Technologies because of the highly competitive market situation, which puts pressure on ASPs and margins. But in July and August VIA’s sales are very likely to improve because of new product launches. The only concern is whether KT600 and PT800 are successful or not.