Graphics card shipments fall as mining demand weakens further
Graphics cards manufacturers see their shipments and sales drop ever since the second half of 2018, mostly due to a drop in demand from the cryptocurrency mining market.
Sources from DigiTimes said that the cryptocurrency mining heyday seen between April 2017 and March 2018 suffered an abrupt downturn in April due partly to the Bitcoin value plunging to under US$7,000 from a peak of nearly US$20,000 recorded in December 2017 and partly to governments of China, South Korea, the US and many European countries rushing to clamp down on digital-coin exchanges following exposures of scams, frauds and market manipulations.
Taiwan graphic cards makers including Asustek Computer, Gigabyte Technology, Micro-Star International (MSI) and TUL have seen their inventories pick up significantly amid the drastic shrinkage in demand from cryptocurrency mining sector. But they have only slightly cut sales prices, maintaining gross margins at around 20%, which, though lower than the previous high of 40-50%, is still twice the level of 8-10% seen in early 2017.
Industry sources said that the prospects for cryptocurrency mining will be increasingly dim due to the enhanced crackdowns by governments in many countries, declining mining investment reward, and the possible move by governments to hike the electricity rates for cryptocurrency-mining uses. In fact, many individual miners and small mining farms have quit the market, and some medium and large-size mining farms have also scaled back their procurements of mining devices.
Accordingly, the sources expected the graphic cards supply chain to return in the second half of 2018 to the previous state of serving mainly the gaming sector seen before the rise of the cryptocurrency mining craze. And those makers with weaker deployments in the gaming sector may see their overall shipments of graphic cards fall significantly in the future.
Meanwhile, TUL is stepping up sales of industrial PC and datacenter acceleration cards as part of its efforts to offset the sales decline in mining graphic cards, the sources indicated.
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I mean, 1~3 year old cards returning to MSRP isn't exactly stellar but still better than nothing I suppose.
While GPU prices have been one road block I still think that RAM is the single biggest offender for quite a while now.
The former at least could've been picked up for more or less reasonable prices second hand for a while now - the latter not so much.
I love that crypto is dying but I don't think prices will ever return to MSRP before a new architecture is released.
Honestly, I'd more like the prices to go back to "normal" levels before the new card generations are released, not afterwards. I guess that only helps people when they try to build up a new rig, any upgrades are in a difficult state right now anyway.
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More for us, less for them.
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Even for new computers it is ridiculous, people now buy a 2 year old architecture cards at higher prices than launch! we all know Pascal is gonna be replaced soon yet it sells for very high
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Indeed, same with AMD's latest Vega cards. But the thing is, would you rather have the drop "back" to MSRP-near prices half a year before something new launches, or afterwards? When everybody's already starving for a new card, paying more for something old can be avoided, paying more for something new AND the old stuff is just double crap for gamers and then all we get is the usual hardware manufacturers complaints "people aren't buying PC hardware anymore" etc.
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Governments hiking electricity prices on miners? First I've heard did that. Is that only high end scale and presumably not Joe blogs at home with 10 cards?