by Anton Shilov
08/05/2003 | 02:50 PM
VIA Technologies announced its revenues for July; it looks like the month was a successful for the firm as its sales increased roughly 1.5 times sequentially. Still, revenues are lower than in the same period last year.
<%BANNER[article]%>Net sales for July of the number two chipset company in the world achieved $48.15 million approximately, a 44.53% increase over June's figure of $33.3 million approximately, but 8.69% lower than in July 2002.
As we predicted a month ago, VIA’s sales started to increase with the ramp of new chipsets for both Socket A and Socket 478 platforms, namely, the KT600 and the PT800. In case mainboard makers and other customers of Taipei, Taiwan-based chipset designer will continue to adopt the new products, the firm’s overall market share may start increasing.
However, there is a concern about margins and profitability of VIA and SiS at this time. We mentioned a month ago that neither VIA nor SiS currently has higher-end core-logic products for desktop market. Moreover, neither of the firms has powerful chipset for mobile computers to come in August as well. As a result, only high yields and not very competitive market space may keep the margins of the Taiwanese chipset designers up in August and possibly in September.
I expect VIA to start fighting back the market share from SiS, however, this may be quite hard given that there will be a lot of very powerful products by Intel, NVIDIA and ATI Technologies for different markets this Fall and VIA will have to fight against all in order to sustain even the current positions.