Recently, we have seen many big companies and brands firing people, trying to restrict their operational expenses. Most of them say as an excuse that the market is going down, with PC part sales being low for all brands. Is this the whole story, though? I had to contact one of my trusted sources with some accurate market data, which is confidential for ordinary people, and hear his part of the story. So here it is:
- Overall, demand is considerably higher than in 2019. However, during COVID-19, demand spiked in 2020/2021. It was around 160-200%, depending on product category. Currently, it’s around 110% of 2019, which is way below 2021. During COVID-19, many companies increased capacity. This capacity is of no use nowadays because demand has returned to a regular growth path.
- Demand for Gaming PCs depends highly on the available performance level. Unfortunately, the RTX 5000 series is delayed. RTX 4090 will be in the market for over two years. Without progress in performance, there is no reason to buy new hardware. Therefore, everyone is expecting the rest of 2023.
- The main issue is that owners and shareholders got greedy after COVID-19 and wouldn’t accept much lower earnings than in 2021. Therefore, most companies are now missing their financial targets despite better performance than in 2019.
- The only products selling well are connected to AI. H100, H200, etc, are selling like crazy.
As you can see, sales numbers are better than in 2019 but notably lower than during COVID-19, when we were all confined to our homes and raided online stores without having anything better to do.
With no new hardware, especially new GPUs, for so long, why would someone build a new system? Even AMD’s new 9000 series processors don’t offer anything notable, so there is no reason for someone having a 7000 series processor to update, especially if it is one of the X3D models. Moreover, Intel is going from bad to worse, so I don’t expect much from its upcoming processors.
Most likely, the new NVIDIA GPUs will be released at the start of 2025, probably during CES, and hopefully, they will boost the PC parts market. But will releasing a new GPU line be enough to provide the required boost? I think it will increase the power supply sales, especially if the new GPUs are more power-hungry than the 4000 series. Still, I see no reason for people with previous-generation CPUs to upgrade, given the AMD 9000 series performance results. Unless Intel manages to deliver with the new Arrow Lake CPUs. Leaked benchmark results show that the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is faster than the 14900KS and the 9950X, but the difference is not that dramatic on Geekbench, especially in single-core operations.
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| Intel Core Ultra 9 285K | AMD Ryzen 9 9950x |
