According to TrendForce’s latest report on this year’s smartphone production, the total volume for 3Q18 grew by 8% from 2Q18 to around 380 million. The growth was attributed to a gradual recovery of demand in 2Q18 and the stock-up of inventories related to releases of new devices and holiday sales events. Although the latest products from Apple and Huawei continue to generate demand in the smartphone market, the sales of new iPhone XR/XS/XS Max turned out to fall short of expectation, resulting in lower shipments of iPhones. Therefore, DRAMeXchange estimates that the total production volume for 4Q18 will be roughly similar to that of 3Q18, coming to around 380 million units.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, notes that x86 continues to be the mainstream architecture for server CPUs this year, with Intel and AMD being the market leaders. Particularly, Intel dominantly represents around 98% of the total server CPU shipments worldwide in 2018. For the next year, the market share of AMD x86 server CPUs is expected to go up to 5%, after the company’s introduction of 7nm CPUs to the market.
According to the latest report by WitsView, a division of TrendForce, the global shipments of branded LCD TV sets for 2018 are forecast to total 218 million units, an increase of 3.4% compared with last year. The market has been driven by stock-up demands for the World Cup and lower prices of TV sets. Since BOE’s Gen 10.5 fab entered production, the costs of large-size panels have witnessed a significant drop, lowering the prices of TV sets as well. Particularly, more attractive retail prices for large-size models may fuel future growth in the TV market.
According to the latest report by TrendForce, the global notebook shipments for 3Q18 are estimated to increase slightly by 3.9% QoQ, reaching 42.68 million units. Compared with the previous forecast of 5~6% growth, this projection has been adjusted 2% downward due to the shortage of Intel CPU.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, reports that the bit output from the NAND Flash industry increased steadily in 3Q18, as suppliers raised the yields of their 64/72-layer 3D NAND production. NAND Flash demand, however, had yet to catch up with supply despite the year-end busy season. The shortage of Intel CPUs and the lower-than-expected sales of new iPhone devices have respectively stifled the demand growths related to notebook PCs and smartphones. Also, the US-China trade dispute has been a negative influence on the whole market. Because the NAND Flash market had been in oversupply since the start of 2018, contract prices of NAND Flash products in 3Q18 registered significant declines from the previous quarter, and the average price drop was 10-15%.
