Corsair Gaming, Inc. ("Corsair" or the "Company"), a leading global provider and innovator of high-performance gear for gamers and content creators, today announced financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2022. Andy Paul, Chief Executive Officer of Corsair, stated, "We achieved 10% sequential revenue growth from Q2 2022 to Q3 2022, while significantly reducing our channel inventory in what remains a challenging environment. Sales out levels from our Channel to Consumers were significantly above pre-pandemic levels in almost all product lines and were above the year ago level in many of our product categories.

As we mentioned in previous quarters, the self-built PC market has been held back over the past 2 years, as high demand for GPU cards from crypto miners caused GPU prices to rise and in some cases double. Now that Crypto mining can no longer utilize graphics cards as they used to, GPU demand has since normalized resulting in a decline in prices back to standard MSRP or below. We are already seeing the positive effects of this on the market.

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2022 fourth quarter ended September 24, 2022. The Company posted a September quarter record revenue of $90.1 billion, up 8 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.29, up 4 percent year over year. Annual revenue was $394.3 billion, up 8 percent year over year, and annual earnings per diluted share were $6.11, up 9 percent year over year.

"This quarter's results reflect Apple's commitment to our customers, to the pursuit of innovation, and to leaving the world better than we found it," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "As we head into the holiday season with our most powerful lineup ever, we are leading with our values in every action we take and every decision we make. We are deeply committed to protecting the environment, to securing user privacy, to strengthening accessibility, and to creating products and services that can unlock humanity's full creative potential."

According to TrendForce research, due to steady weakening of overall demand for consumer electronics, inventory pressure has increased among downstream distributors and brands. Although there are still sporadic shortages of specific components, the curtain has officially fallen on a two-year wave of shortages in general, and brands have gradually suspended stocking in response to changes in market conditions. However, stable demand for automotive and industrial equipment is key to supporting the ongoing growth of foundry output value. At the same time, since the creation of a marginal amount of new capacity in 2Q22 led to growth in wafer shipments and a price hike for certain wafers, this drove output value among top ten foundries to reach US$33.20 billion in 2Q22. Quarterly growth fell to 3.9% on a weakening consumer market.

A prelude to inventory correction was officially revealed in 3Q22. In addition to intensifying severity in the initial wave of order slashing for LDDI/TDDI, and TV SoC, diminishing order volume also extended to non-Apple smartphone APs and peripheral IC PMIC, CIS, and consumer electronics PMICs, and mid-to-low-end MCUs, posing a challenge for foundry capacity utilization. However, the launch of the new iPhone in 3Q22 is expected to prop up a certain amount of stocking momentum for the sluggish market. Therefore, top ten foundry revenue in 3Q22 is expected to maintain a growth trend driven by high-priced processes and quarterly growth rate is expected to be slightly higher than in 2Q22.

According to the latest TrendForce statistics, revenue of the top ten global IC design houses reached US$39.56 billion in 2Q22, growing 32% YoY. Growth was primarily driven by demand for data centers, networking, IoT, and high-end product portfolios. AMD achieved synergy through mergers and acquisitions. In addition to climbing to third place, the company also posted the highest annual revenue growth rate in 2Q22 at 70%.

Qualcomm continues in the No. 1 position worldwide, exhibiting growth in the mobile phone, RF front-end, automotive, and IoT sectors. Sales of mid/low-end mobile phone APs were weak but demand for high-end mobile phone APs was relatively stable. Company revenue reached US$9.38 billion, or 45% growth YoY. NVIDIA benefitted from expanded application of GPUs in data centers to expand this product category's revenue share past the 50% mark to 53.5%, making up for the 13% YoY slump in its game application business, bringing total revenue to US$7.09 billion, though annual growth rate slowed to 21%. AMD reorganized its business after the addition of Xilinx and Pensando. The company's embedded division revenue increased by 2,228% YoY. In addition, its data center department also made a considerable contribution. AMD posted revenue of US$6.55 billion, achieving 70% growth YoY, highest amongst the top ten. Broadcom's sales performance in semiconductor solutions remained solid and demand for cloud services, data centers, and networking is quite strong. The company's purchase order backlog is still increasing with 2Q22 revenue reaching US$6.49 billion, an annual growth rate of 31%.

According to TrendForce investigations into the DRAM market, under pressure from ever-increasing output, Korean manufacturers have significantly increased their willingness to compromise on pricing in order to stimulate buying from distributors and customers, leading to a steady expansion of falling prices. In addition to Korean manufacturers enthusiastically slashing prices, low-priced chips from the spot market are also circulating in the market. Other suppliers have no choice but to follow suit and fervently reduce pricing for sales, rapidly exacerbating the 3Q consumer DRAM price drop from the original estimate of 8~13% to a quarterly decline of 13-18%.

Looking forward to Q4, it will be difficult for stocking momentum to recover before terminal inventories have been completely depleted. TrendForce expects the price of consumer DRAM to continue to fall until oversupply in the market is alleviated. Thus, consumer DRAM pricing will carry on moving lower by another 3~8% in Q4 and the possibility of sustained decline cannot be ruled out.

Corsair Gaming, Inc. ("Corsair" or the "Company"), a leading global provider and innovator of high-performance gear for gamers and content creators, today announced financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. Andy Paul, Chief Executive Officer of Corsair, stated, "Headwinds from Q1 persisted through Q2, which is seasonally the lowest quarter for us, with macro-economic headwinds affecting consumer spending on gaming gear, especially in Europe combined with global inflation, the continued Russia and Ukraine conflict, and high freight costs. This resulted in a buildup of inventory both in our warehouses as well as in the retail channel, thus causing our channel partners to delay ordering while they clear this stock.

Despite the challenging environment, we continue to see positive underlying growth trends in the gaming hardware sector, and we see spending levels significantly above pre -pandemic levels. We are also starting to see more enthusiasts building gaming PCs again as graphics cards are now more readily available at reasonable prices. We saw very positive signs during Amazon Prime week, with component activity significantly higher than in 2021, both in Europe as well as in the United States. While we are disappointed with the lower results in Q2, we are very pleased to see positive market activity recently and with our channel inventory moving back into line during Q2 and Q3 2022, we expect demand for our products to recover well as we finish the year and look forward to an exciting 2023."

According to TrendForce, market oversupply intensified in 2Q22 due to lagging demand and continued NAND Flash output and process advancement. The market consensus is a disappointing 2H22 peak season for consumer electronics including notebooks, TVs, and smartphones. Material inventory levels continue to rise and has become a risk to the supply chain. Due to slow destocking among distributors and a conservative stocking approach among clients, inventory problems have bubbled over upstream onto the supply side and sellers are under increased pressure to sell. TrendForce estimates, due to the rapid deterioration of the balance between supply and demand, the drop in NAND Flash pricing will expand to 8~13% in 3Q22, and this decline may continue into 4Q22.

In terms of Client SSD, due to weak consumer demand, various PC brands have significantly reduced their purchase order volume in 3Q22 in order to digest 1H22 SSD inventory. As suppliers shift focus to 176-layer client SSD, 176-layer QLC SSDs have begun to ship, and YMTC looks to expand shipment of notebook client SSDs in 2H22, price competition has become increasingly fierce, forcing manufacturers to increase price concessions to incentivize clients to up order volume. Thus, the decline in client SSD pricing is expected to expand to 8~13% in 3Q22.

According to TrendForce investigations, foundries have seen a wave of order cancellations with the first of these revisions originating from large-size Driver IC and TDDI, which rely on mainstream 0.1X μm and 55 nm processes, respectively. Although products such as MCU and PMIC were previously in short supply, foundries' capacity utilization rate remained roughly at full capacity through their adjustment of product mix. However, a recent wave cancellations have emerged for PMIC, CIS, and certain MCU and SoC orders. Although still dominated by consumer applications, foundries are beginning to feel the strain of the copious order cancellations from customers and capacity utilization rate has officially declined.

Looking at trends in 2H22, TrendForce indicates, in addition to no relief from the sustained downgrade of driver IC demand, inventory adjustment has begun for smartphones, PCs, and TV-related peripheral components such as SoCs, CIS, and PMICs, and companies are beginning to curtail their wafer input plans with foundries. This phenomenon of order cancellations is occurring simultaneously in 8-inch and 12-inch fabs at nodes including 0.1X μm, 90/55 nm, and 40/28 nm. Not even the advanced 7/6 nm processes are immune.

Razer (RAZFF) is set to become privately held after shareholders voted to delist from the Hong Kong stock exchange in a privatization deal that values the company at $3.17 billion USD. The privatization scheme is led by a consortium of Razer's co-founders Tan and Kaling Lim who currently own 57% of the company along with private equity firm CVC Capital Partners. The plan was approved by over 75% of shareholders at a recent general meeting and will see the withdrawal of company shares from the Hong Kong stock exchange at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, 13 May 2022. This private ownership of the company isn't expected to last long with the owners planning to relist the company's shares in the US in the hopes of gathering a higher valuation. Razer continues to record growth with revenues of $1.62 billion USD in the 2021 FY, up 33% from the previous year.

NVIDIA has recently launched a global campaign to promote the availability of RTX 30 series graphics cards with multiple retailers and manufacturers informing customers of increased shipments. The launch of this campaign also coincides with the 5th consecutive month of price drops for NVIDIA GPU prices with the average price now at 119% of MSRP according to the latest report from 3D Center. The stores participating in the campaign appear to have most cards as now available or restocking with some cards receiving minor price cuts.

NVIDIAGeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards are now available! Get the ultimate play with immersive ray tracing, a huge AI performance boost with NVIDIA DLSS, game-winning responsiveness with NVIDIA Reflex, and AI-powered voice & video with NVIDIA Broadcast.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced that its board of directors approved a new $8 billion share repurchase program. The new authorization is in addition to the $4 billion share repurchase program announced in May 2021, under which the company has repurchased approximately $3 billion of shares of AMD common stock.

"We are pleased to expand our share repurchase program based on the strength of our balance sheet and expectations for future free cash flow generation," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "With our strong financial performance, we are able to increase investments to drive long-term growth while returning additional value to our shareholders."

In 4Q21, NAND Flash bit shipments grew by only 3.3% QoQ, a significant decrease from the nearly 10% in 3Q21, according to TrendForce's investigations. ASP fell by nearly 5% and the overall industry posted revenue of US$18.5 billion, a QoQ decrease of 2.1%. This was primarily due to a decline in the purchase demand of various products and a market shift to oversupply causing a drop in contract prices. In 4Q21, with the exception of enterprise SSD, the supply of which was limited by insufficient upstream components, the prices of other NAND Flash products such as eMMC, UFS, and client SSD, all fell.

TrendForce's summary of NAND Flash market sales performance in 2021 is as follows: although there have been signs of weakening since 2H21, thanks to remote services and cloud demand driven by the pandemic, revenue performance still grew significantly compared to 2020. Revenue reached US$68.6 billion, up 21.1% YoY, the second-biggest increase since 2018.

From 2020 to 2025, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12-inch equivalent wafer capacity at the world's top ten foundries will be approximately 10% with the majority of these companies focusing on 12-inch capacity expansion, which will see a CAGR of approximately 13.2%, according to TrendForce's research. In terms of 8-inch wafers, due to factors such as difficult to obtain equipment and whether capacity expansion is cost-effective, most fabs can only expand production slightly by means of capacity optimization, equating to a CAGR of only 3.3%. In terms of demand, the products primarily derived from 8-inch wafers, PMIC and Power Discrete, are driven by demand for electric vehicles, 5G smartphones, and servers. Stocking momentum has not fallen off, resulting in a serious shortage of 8-inch wafer production capacity that has festered since 2H19. Therefore, in order to mitigate competition for 8-inch capacity, a trend of shifting certain products to 12-inch production has gradually emerged. However, if shortages in overall 8-inch capacity is to be effectively alleviated, it is still necessary to wait for a large number of mainstream products to migrate to 12-inch production. The timeframe for this migration is estimated to be close to 2H23 into 2024.

Although no official word on NVIDIA's rumored failed acquisition of Arm has been announced, UK politicians are now pushing for SoftBank to float Arm Holdings on the UK stock market. This has at least to some degree to do with the fact that the UK wants to keep Arm in the UK, partially due to some claimed national security concerns that apparently weren't present five years ago when the company was sold to SoftBank.

Arm Holdings is said to be worth around £30 billion on its own and several British MP's (Members of Parliament) have stepped up to say that the Arm Holdings should return to the London stock market rather than elsewhere, such as New York, "to ensure its interests and those of its investors are aligned with our national interest" and that the company "should stay British". Time will tell what happens to Arm, but until we have official word from NVIDIA and SoftBank, we have to assume that there's still ongoing discussions between the two parties.

Driven by forces such as the pandemic, geopolitics, and the digital transformation of everyday life, there has been a shortage of global foundry production capacity for nearly two years and shortages have been especially severe for mature 1Xnm~180nm nodes, according to TrendForce's investigations. Although all foundries are furiously increasing capital expenditures to expand capacity, unrealized future expansion does not ease existing supply issues. In addition, the uneven distribution of supply chain resources that has exacerbated the shortage of parts and components has yet to be definitively alleviated. Circumstances as a whole will continue affecting shipments of related whole devices. Only the PC category is expected to emerge largely unscathed in 1Q22.

Moving into 1Q22, TrendForce states, due to the limited increase in production capacity, the market's supply situation is expected to be approximately the same as in 4Q21. However, some end products have entered their traditional off-season cycle and the slowdown in demand momentum is expected to alleviate the immediate pressure on OEMs and ODMs regarding supply chain stocking.

More than a year after the release of Microsoft's Xbox Series X console and demand still hasn't abated - many customers are still trying to get their hands on a piece of Xbox Series X hardware, which is continually sold-out at most retailers and e-tailers that actually practice sane pricing. Many companies have tried to adapt to the new world of scalping by adding queue systems, locking inventory behind subscription services such as Amazon Prime, or via private buy links sent out via email. Microsoft seems to have chosen the latter as the 2021 holiday season fast approaches - the company has been sending links for Xbox Series X bundles to "valued Xbox customers", allowing them to purchase an Xbox Series X directly from Microsoft without having to compete with the scalpers or bots in the general Microsoft store.

The Xbox Series X bundles include an Xbox Series X with two controllers and one game. The Verge notes customers can choose one game out of Madden 22, GTA V, Rust, Far Cry 6, Hasbro Family Fun Pack, Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate, Insurgency Sandstorm, or Diablo 2 Resurrected. There's no real way to tell how Microsoft is choosing which customers to send these links to - it sounds plausible that it's targeting users that have purchased either Xbox software or hardware via the U.S. Microsoft Store. Even with this mailing campaign, consoles will be sold in a first-come, first-served basis - the link may lead users towards a page where the Series X is out of stock all the same, but it certainly does give users that slightly higher chance to finally score a latest gen Xbox console.

The growth of the NAND Flash market in 3Q21 was primarily driven by strong demand from the data center and smartphone industries, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. More specifically, NAND Flash suppliers' hyperscaler and enterprise clients kept up their procurement activities that began in 2Q21 in order to deploy products based on new processor platforms. Major smartphone brands, on the other hand, likewise expanded their NAND Flash procurement activities during the quarter as they prepared to release their new flagship models. As such, clients in both server and smartphone industries made significant contributions to the revenue growth of the NAND Flash industry for 3Q21. At the same time, however, suppliers also warned that orders from PC OEMs began showing signs of decline. On the whole, the industry's quarterly total NAND Flash bit shipment increased by nearly 11% QoQ for 3Q21, and the overall NAND Flash ASP rose by nearly 4% QoQ for the same quarter. Thanks to rising prices and expanding shipments, the quarterly total NAND Flash revenue increased by 15% QoQ to a new record high of US$18.8 billion in 3Q21.

According to this Reddit thread, multiple AMD customers are reporting that the latest stock update on AMD's web store has left them without a desired product, and anger over the broken functionality. As AMD operates its own web-based storefront with all the latest CPUs and GPUs, users are constantly checking if the store has anything to offer in these times of processor scarcity, where it is impossible to purchase the latest generation of graphics cards or processors. AMD updated the website today with the newest batch of Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics cards, users have been reporting that the website functionality has been broken.

Multiple users tried to purchase their desired product, but the AMD website notified them that the queue is paused for about 30 minutes, and seemingly no one was able to purchase anything. People have been reporting that the Captcha used to verify that you are not a robot has failed as well, and adding the product to the cart was impossible, as seen in the image below. As there are multiple such comments posted in the thread, it leads us to write a report on it, wondering what is going on with AMD's storefront operations and what AMD is doing about it. With multiple users trying to purchase an AMD product, they were left with their hands empty, to wonder what is going on.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported record revenue for the second quarter ended August 1, 2021, of $6.51 billion, up 68 percent from a year earlier and up 15 percent from the previous quarter, with record revenue from the company's Gaming, Data Center and Professional Visualization platforms. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.94, up 276 percent from a year ago and up 24 percent from the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.04, up 89 percent from a year ago and up 14 percent from the previous quarter.

"NVIDIA's pioneering work in accelerated computing continues to advance graphics, scientific computing and AI," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Enabled by the NVIDIA platform, developers are creating the most impactful technologies of our time - from natural language understanding and recommender systems, to autonomous vehicles and logistic centers, to digital biology and climate science, to metaverse worlds that obey the laws of physics.

As pressure mounts over Sony and Microsoft's (in)ability to deliver their current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series S|X consoles at a fast enough pace to satisfy demand, it seems that users now have yet another reason to throw their gamer hands up in the air in frustration. Stocks of new PS4 / PS4 Pro and Xbox One S|X have been increasingly harder to come by in recent times, and especially in the US, stock of the last-gen consoles on Amazon, Target, Walmart and GameStop is virtually non-existent. The only choice prospective gamers have is to find a second-hand last-gen console - and pricing on those seems to be (predictably) going up.

When one looks at it, it does make sense that last-gen consoles are also becoming hard to find, despite the fact that they haven't been discontinued yet. It all pertains to the finite resources at manufacturers' disposal. Even if there are no common components between last and current-gen consoles, the difficulties faced by the supply chain in procuring even raw materials for fabrication means that manufacturers have to prioritize resource allocation - and it seems obvious that both Sony and Microsoft would prioritize current-gen consoles over the alternative. The stock issues even extend to peripherals - controllers for Sony's PS4 are also out of stock, and while the PS5's Dual Sense sees healthy stock levels, that controller has no backwards compatibility, meaning that users looking for a replacement or additional PS4 controller have to make do with either used ones or third-party alternatives. As for Xbox controllers, fear not - they're in stock, for both current and last-gen systems.

The German media outlet, 3D Center, has today published an updated report for July, measuring graphics card pricing in Germany and Austria, showing some pretty interesting results. The report is only measuring the pricing index of these two countries and their retailers, so it does not apply to other regions. An interesting discovery is that GPU prices have now hit the lowest point since February of this year when the sharp price incline started. At the time of reporting, GPU prices are exaggerated by around 53% over the MSRP listed prices. Not only did the prices drop, but the supply of GPUs like AMD Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti became much better, as consumers can get their hands on these now.

When looking at the graph below, note that MSRP is listed as 100%, and the percentage shown is the increase over that MSRP. When it comes to complete price reduction to the MSRP, 3D Center expects it to happen in 3-4 weeks possibly. If current data is to be believed, MSRP is slowly decreasing and supply is increasing rapidly. For more details and per-card pricing situation, head over to 3D Center website here. Here is an important statement from 3D Center about the current situation:

3D Center (translated from German)Of course, this means that current street prices for graphics cards are (mostly) still exaggerated - and above all that this is the worst possible time to buy a graphics card. Because the (now clearly verifiable) tendency points to clearly lower graphics card prices in the next few weeks, with a similar pace, street prices at list price level could be in sight in 3-4 weeks. It is possible that there will be a certain braking effect in the downward price movement beforehand - but at least the way up to that point should definitely be taken with you. Apparently the delivery quantities are currently sufficient, maybe the need is a bit lower because of the summer times (and no longer available on the part of the crypto miners)so that retailers receive more cards than they sell. Since the retailers usually bought their cards from the distributors at an exaggerated price, the big game is now about who can get rid of the expensive stock goods in time to make a profit at all in the face of constantly falling sales prices.

Total NAND Flash revenue for 1Q21 increased by 5.1% QoQ to US$14.82 billion, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In particular, bit shipments rose by 11% QoQ, while the overall ASP dropped by 5% QoQ; hence, bit shipment growth offset the decline in the overall ASP. Although NAND Flash demand from notebook computer and smartphone manufacturers remained high, clients from the data center segment exhibited relatively weak demand, since this segment had yet to leave the state of NAND Flash oversupply. Contract prices for this quarter therefore still mostly showed a considerable QoQ drop. On the other hand, OEMs/ODMs of end products began to increase procurement of NAND Flash products from the second half of January onward because they noticed that the shortage of NAND Flash controller ICs was affecting the production of medium- and low-density storage products. Besides avoiding a possible supply crunch in the future, OEMs/ODMs were placing additional orders because they were preparing for a push to expand market share. On account of these developments, the overall NAND Flash demand surpassed expectations in 1Q21.

The US Government, specifically the Department of Defense (DoD), has under the Trump administration blacklisted the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. This was a way to impose sanctions on the Chinese company as it was believed that Xiaomi was involved with the Chinese military, thus the Trump organization had problems having US investors taking a share of it. However, the company has issued legal proceedings against the US government for making such claims, and now the US govt., administrated by the President Joe Biden, has reached an agreement with the company. Xiaomi managed to prove that it is not owned or controlled by the Chinese military, so the US DoD has removed the company from its blacklist.

This has caused the company shares to soar on the Hong Kong stock exchange by as much as 6.7% after the news appeared. "The Biden Administration is deeply concerned about potential U.S. investments in companies linked to the Chinese military and fully committed to keeping up pressure on such companies", said Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.

According to the official company website, Apple will no longer manufacture its iMac Pro computers based on Intel processors. Instead, the company will carry these models in its store, only while the supplies last. Apple will be replacing these models with next-generation iMac Pro devices that will be home to the custom Apple Silicon processors, combining Arm CPU cores with custom GPU design. Having a starting price of 4990 USD, the Apple iMac Pro was able to max out at 15000 USD. The most expensive part was exactly the Intel Xeon processor inside it, among the AMD GPU with HBM. Configuration pricing was also driven by storage/RAM options. However, even the most expensive iMac Pro with its 2017 hardware had no chance against the regular 2020 iMac, so the product was set to be discontinued sooner or later.

When the stock of the iMac Pro runs out, Apple will replace this model with its Apple Silicon equipped variant. According to the current rumor mill, Apple is set to hold a keynote on March 16th that will be an announcement for new iMac Pro devices with custom processors. What happens is only up to Apple, so we have to wait and see.

Members form the UK Parliament are apparently preparing to introduce a bill that would regulate the scalping phenomenon that's being witnessed worldwide. According to Scottish politician Douglas Chapman, in an interview to IGN, "The issue of scalping first came up with constituents contacting me to explain their frustration about being unable to get hold of certain games consoles or computer components pre-Christmas." He then expanded on that by adding that "On investigation, we uncovered more details of the unscrupulous practice of 'scalping' by automated bots to bulk buy these goods and sell them on at inflated prices." Oh, and this bill is unlikely to pass, by the way.

Scalping, however, isn't done only in the UK; it's a pervasive international issue that crosses borders. And scalping, as it is known, is nothing but a form of speculation, which some might say is part of the backbone that keeps the world's capitalist blood pumping through the economy - some might even argue that scalping occurs directly due to mechanisms of supply and demand, and thus, isn't an unlawful activity in and of itself. Companies, corporations, and all other legal entities, however, have to adhere to strict anti-monopoly/anti-cartelization laws, which deal with the same base issue, although in another facet of it. The problem is that it appears that in some countries, speculation is regulated at the enterprise level, but not at the citizen level. And herein lies the crux of it.