Market research: overestimation of GPU demand leads to surpluses at makers

According to analysts, the manufacturers of separate video cards have surpluses of cards. “Demand for add-in boards was below supply early in 2018, leaving makers with excess inventory,” writes market research firm Jon Peddie Research.

Jon Peddie Research states that this impacted Q4 2018 sales and that the impact will also be seen in Q1 and Q2 2019. Compared to Q4 2017, GPU deliveries decreased by 2, 65 percent. AMD delivered 6.8 percent, Nvidia 7.6 percent and Intel 0.7 percent. In terms of market share, AMD lost 0.6 percent in that fourth quarter, Nvidia 0.82 percent and Intel took in 1.4 percent market share.

Normally, deliveries in the fourth quarter remain the same or increase. A decline of 2.65 percent is thus well below the ten-year average for fourth quarters, which stands at an increase of 11.59 percent.

In addition, the total amount of GPU deliveries in the entire year 2018 decreased by 3.3 percent compared to 2017. If you only look at desktop GPUs, a decrease of 20 percent can be seen. Notebook GPU deliveries actually increased by 8 percent from 2017 to 2018. It is striking that although GPU deliveries decreased, PC sales increased by 1.61 percent.

Nvidia’s quarterly figures also showed that deliveries are declining, most likely due to the declining popularity of video card crypto mining.