Stefan Mileschin

Both AMD and Intel’s results this week make it clear that the PC market will never be quite the same again.

And while shareholders in both Intel and AMD will be concerned about the future of the PC business, the effect of people not buying PCs and opting instead for smartphones and tablets is having reverberations down the whole supply chain.

That’s underlined by a report in Digitimes that said Taiwanese original design manufacturers (ODMs) will soon be approached by the big boys with request for quotes on machines using Intel’s Skylake microprocessors.

As industry analysts also noted this week, there have been inventory build ups in the supply chain and that’s going to prompt the multinationals to be cautious about over ordering machines from the ODMs.

Digitimes said that Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer and Asustek will send their requests for quotes any day now – and if they’re over cautious, the ODMs, already operating on very narrow margins, may make losses, particularly as the quotes they’ll deliver to the multinationals will be cut throat.

It’s not just the manufacturers who are being squeezed, of course. The decline in demand for PCs will have its effect on graphics card manufacturers, distributors, and dealers too.

http://www.techeye.net/desktops/mult...e-on-pc-makers