According to investigations by TrendForce, smartphone demand has already made it out of the gloomy offseason of 2Q19, with production volume coming to 344 million units, a 10.5% QoQ growth. Yet the many uncertainties circulating in the international market still caused smartphone production volume to weaken by 2.4% YoY in 2Q19, with the top six being Samsung, Huawei, Apple, OPPO, Xiaomi and Vivo in descending order.
According to the latest notebook shipments report by TrendForce, concerns over the US-China trade dispute and the Intel CPU shortage originally casted a conservative cloud over the overall outlook for market in 2Q19. Yet three factors played a role in pushing 2Q shipments to 41.5 million units to give an expectation-exceeding QoQ growth of 12.1%: (1) AMD CPUs are being substituted for Intel CPUs; (2) Chromebooks find increased demand in the form of tenders; and (3) worries arising from the trade dispute moved brands to stock up anticipatorily.
According to WitsView, a division of TrendForce, although the US-China trade dispute reached a ceasefire after the Trump-Xi meeting at G20, TV brands have been engaging in preemptive stocking in 2Q due to fears of a 25% tariff to be placed into effect in 3Q as well as Samsung Display's (SDC) original decision to shut down their Gen 8.5 L8-1-1 plant. This caused TV panel prices to plunge in June to an unforeseeable extent.
TrendForce has released its 1Q19 rankings for the top ten IC design companies worldwide by revenue, which showed only MediaTek maintaining a small growth among the top five as Broadcom, Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD all showed declines. Nvidia declined the most by 24.4% YoY due to unfinished destocking.
According to TrendForce’s latest report, global smartphone demand has weakened even more than originally predicted due to the escalating global politico-economic risks, with global production volume feared to widen in decline from a previously forecast worst case scenario of 5% to 7%, landing at 1.4 billion units.
