Nvidia GPU shipments could plummet – meaning further price falls?
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Nvidia’s graphics card shipments for 2022 could fall dramatically, at least if a new prediction is right.
This comes from a DigiTimes (opens in new tab) report which claims that, going by forecasts from Taiwanese graphics card suppliers, Nvidia’s shipments for this year are set to fall by something like 40% to 50%.
DigiTimes underlines that this will mean the amount of money raked in by Team Green will also drop substantially, or indeed as the report puts it, revenue is set to decline at a “pace beyond imagination” – which sounds pretty serious.
All of this is down to the crypto crash and an overall post-pandemic weakening in demand for desktop GPUs.
Analysis: More fuel on the GPU price cut fire?
This prediction for Nvidia lines up with the firm’s recent fiscal results which showed a chunky drop in revenue, and gaming graphics cards were badly hit, with sales falling by 33% year-on-year. So the rest of 2022 ushering in drops of 40% in shipments, or maybe more, is not an unbelievable scenario; although we must of course be very cautious when it comes to predictions like this from DigiTimes. Obviously, this is just educated guesswork at what’s around the corner for Nvidia, and things may turn out differently.
That said, looking at the current economic climate – which is seriously shaky on a number of fronts – it’s not difficult to imagine that the rest of 2022 will be a sticky wicket for Team Green. As inflation and cost of living hikes hit home and heap misery on consumers, there’s clearly going to be less money to spend on more frivolous things like upgrading graphics cards.
As you may have seen, Nvidia and its partners have already been dropping prices to counter what Team Green described as a ‘significant’ decline in sell-through projections for fiscal Q2, and as we’ve argued before, we anticipate further price cuts to come on current-gen Ampere GPUs.
There is purportedly still a fair bit of excess RTX 3000 stock to clear before next-gen Lovelace graphics cards are launched (and those new GPUs take much of the remaining momentum out of current-gen sales). And this forecast of potential further weakness for Nvidia as the rest of 2022 plays out – if the company really does experience a revenue decline at an ‘unimaginable’ pace – might reinforce the need to generate further RTX 3000 sales via more discounting.
After all, it’s crucial that Nvidia’s graphics card making partners can get rid of excess Ampere stock before RTX 4000 GPUs can be fully unleashed (and if that stock clearance doesn’t happen in good time, we might even see all but the RTX 4090 delayed until 2023, as the rumor mill has already suggested).
Nvidia isn’t the only company to be affected by the current economic woes, of course. The DigiTimes report also asserts that AMD and Intel now have a gloomier outlook for shipment and revenue projections for this year. Intel expects a revenue drop of between $8 and $11 billion, and a 10% drop in PC sales compared to 2021.
AMD expects shipments to drop by around 15%, but its revenue for Q3 should still go up slightly, putting it in a better position than Intel – after it took market share off Team Blue in server CPUs and embedded processors during Q2, during which Team Red’s revenue grew massively (by 70%, no less).
Via Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab)