Asus and Gigabyte can’t shift excess GPUs and motherboards as cryptocurrency hangover bites

It’s not looking good for motherboard and graphics card manufacturers in the first half of 2019 - they're both reportedly stuck with excess stock no one's buying. The short supply of Intel CPUs, poor Chinese growth, massive crypto valuation dips, and the US-China trade war have all made the perfect storm for Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, who are still holding onto excess stock from crypto-crash earlier in the year. Now where have we heard that before? This time last year the adjacent worlds of PC gaming and crypto-mining hardware were experiencing mad growth due to the profitability of cryptocurrencies. However, that narrative ended as we entered Q2 2018. Bitcoin has now plummeted to just a fraction of its previous highs of over $17,000 in late 2017, now sitting at $5,283 following another crash. The Taiwanese manufacturers are really struggling - Asus, is currently down 43% YoY in terms of its net profit, and Gigabyte’s net profit for Q3 2018 is reportedly down to NT$132 million. That might still sound like a lot but, for some perspective, DigiTimes reports that's the lowest quarterly level recorded by Gigabyte since Q4 2008. Yes, the year when financial institutions the world over broke everything.

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