Bursting PC Inventories Might Stoke Aggressive Discounts and Promotions

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The desire to clear inventory might help push prices down further in the coming weeks.

Reports published in Taiwan’s business-facing journals don’t paint a rosy picture of the PC industry. Today the China Times reported that PC-making OEMs like Acer, Asus, and MSI are seeing their inventories “burst” with stock, which has been kept back due to retail channels not being able to clear products. Similar problems face the ODMs who make PCs and laptops for the likes of HP, Dell, Apple, et al.

Two of the worst affected companies with inventory overload are Asus and Quanta. Asus looks like it is in particularly bad shape among the OEMs, with the equivalent of $6.8bn worth of inventory going nowhere. This represents a near 60% increase over its inventory levels at the same time last year. Only Quanta has greater inventory, worth approx $8.4bn, which is nearly a 55% increase over last year.

Interestingly, the China Times report, highlighted by analyst Dan Nystedt, has some deeper insider info about the makeup of Asus inventory and the company’s perspective on the situation. Apparently, about half of Asus inventory is finished products, and the other half is components and ICs.

Some Asus products and components will reportedly have to be sold in the coming quarter(s), or they will be out of date and lose a lot of value. However, Asus estimates it can use about 80-90% of its inventory ICs and components to make next-gen products and PCs. Nevertheless, Asus has set a target to clear a quarter of its existing inventory by the end of the year.

Aggressive inventory clearance targets, like the one set by Asus, could be good for end-users looking to snap up a bargain. The China Times sources reckon most PC brands will “aggressively push finished products to the channel through discounts and promotions.” As a result, PC and components makers will simply have to sacrifice some profits to see retail stocks and warehouse inventories clear. How the companies achieve this could make quite some difference to their Q3 and Q4 2022 financials.

Of course, the above inventory issues are being experienced as recession fears heighten. At the height of the pandemic, consumers and companies couldn’t get enough PCs for entertainment and WFH, and we saw some components in extremely short supply – made much worse by the crypto boom in the case of GPUs. However, the demand curve seems to have snapped back very rapidly, with crypto crashing, the energy crunch, and the war in Ukraine (though these three effects might be closely connected).

Mark Tyson
Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • InvalidError
    Being "confident they can use 80-90% of their ICs in next-gen PCs" is one thing, demand for next-gen PCs is another. Having parts for next-gen stuff most of the market is going to skip because they just had their wallets raped during COVID isn't going to help OEMs much. The downward trend that lead to the current over-supply is unlikely to end any time soon.
    Reply
  • ikernelpro4
    InvalidError said:
    Being "confident they can use 80-90% of their ICs in next-gen PCs" is one thing, demand for next-gen PCs is another. Having parts for next-gen stuff most of the market is going to skip because they just had their wallets raped during COVID isn't going to help OEMs much. The downward trend that lead to the current over-supply is unlikely to end any time soon.
    The problem is not just oversupply and bad state of economy. The issue is also that OEMs are refusing to sell below 10% price cuts.

    Buying a 3070 or 3080 for 899€ currently is just not financially clever. Especially with energy prices rising and the 3000 series being lazy in terms of power design.
    Reply
  • gg83
    InvalidError said:
    Being "confident they can use 80-90% of their ICs in next-gen PCs" is one thing, demand for next-gen PCs is another. Having parts for next-gen stuff most of the market is going to skip because they just had their wallets raped during COVID isn't going to help OEMs much. The downward trend that lead to the current over-supply is unlikely to end any time soon.
    Yeah maybe 2% of people waited for prices to drop. There is a reason nobody is buying products now.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    These companies are still acting like it's a bad thing to have an inventory of their product in stock and ready to sell. They're even acting like it's a bad thing to have an adequate supply of raw materials and spare parts on hand. Did they not learn anything over the last 2 years of "supply chain constraints"?

    Maybe "having a few too many" is a better problem to have than "having none at all, and also you can't get any more"
    Reply
  • AgentBirdnest
    InvalidError said:
    Being "confident they can use 80-90% of their ICs in next-gen PCs" is one thing, demand for next-gen PCs is another. Having parts for next-gen stuff most of the market is going to skip because they just had their wallets raped during COVID isn't going to help OEMs much. The downward trend that lead to the current over-supply is unlikely to end any time soon.
    Very good point. A bunch of people bought new PCs for entertainment/work-from-home during the pandemic... but how often do people buy a new PC? My friends who buy pre-builts usually buy a new one about every 5-7 years, and that is under normal economic conditions.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    Asus has many of the most expensive products out there. I'm not surprised they would be having inventory challenges given their reluctance to lower prices. Asus appears to think they're the PC version of Nike or UA.

    Am I the only one who thinks there hasn't been meaningful performance improvement in the mobile PC space? Part numbers keep going up, but devices are so thin they throttle horribly.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Giroro said:
    These companies are still acting like it's a bad thing to have an inventory of their product in stock and ready to sell.
    Excess inventory means increased storage costs, capital being locked into inventory, that inventory being subject to depreciation as it becomes more difficult to sell for a decent amount of money, an increased likelihood that product will fail or get damaged during storage, etc. Some warehouse space to buffer inputs/outputs between shipments is good, too much is dangerous and expensive.

    AgentBirdnest said:
    Very good point. A bunch of people bought new PCs for entertainment/work-from-home during the pandemic... but how often do people buy a new PC? My friends who buy pre-builts usually buy a new one about every 5-7 years, and that is under normal economic conditions.
    Most people I know buy a sub-$1000 laptop every 5-7 years or use their phone for just about everything. My older sister has a ~10 years old PC she only uses to print stuff.
    Reply
  • daworstplaya
    InvalidError said:
    Being "confident they can use 80-90% of their ICs in next-gen PCs" is one thing, demand for next-gen PCs is another. Having parts for next-gen stuff most of the market is going to skip because they just had their wallets raped during COVID isn't going to help OEMs much. The downward trend that lead to the current over-supply is unlikely to end any time soon.

    Not to mention the people that played the Newegg GPU lottery game and never got a shot after months of waiting and just plain gave up. A lot of people I know decided to skip this generation and wait for the next. Same thing with CPUs to a certain extent, whichis why the new Raptor lake and Zen4 CPUs don't excite me much. There is only so much wallet raping a gamer can take before they decide what they have is good enough.
    Reply
  • systemBuilder_49
    I don't know about you but I am DONE with burning my thighs with the Intel powerpig 11th gen 12th gen or 13th gen processors! Seriously, who enjoys resting a 120w lightbulb on their thighs? There is truly nothing new available from Intel, only AMD is innovating but Intel is using its dirty tricks again to keep AMD laptops off the shelves at retailers!

    I won the Newegg lottery and got a 3070 TI for only 25% over MSRP in February. It was the most inefficient gpu available on the 3xxx series, so I had a chance to win it ...
    Reply
  • Nspace
    systemBuilder_49 said:
    Intel powerpig 11th gen 12th gen or 13th gen processors!

    This together with cases like intel's DELL's alienwares not having alternatives of upgradeable RAM for 15 or 14 inches laptops. In the latest three years RAM has come soldered at DELL most advanced mobile models, which translates in heating up already crowded motherboards, let alone negating customers the chance of future upgrading while increasing failure rates...

    Stop walled garden strategies that tie innovation and certain good metrics with customer dissatisfaction in others. Many of us have been postponing buys or buying enough-for-a-while product...
    You have been lowering your sale numbers and at the present economic climate, we have even less chances to buy, so the damage is done and it shows.
    Time for you Companies to better plan ahead and design really interesting products for when the economy recovers
    Reply