Despite the launch of Intel's new 6th generation Core Skylake CPUs, motherboard sales have dropped by 10 percent in 2015 and the same trend is expected next year, according to the latest report.

According to a report from Digitimes.com, motherboard sales have been rather disappointing in 2015, with a drop of 10 percent. To make things worse, the decline is expected to continue next year. According to the report, major motherboard manufacturers, like ASUS and Gigabyte, have shipped 17 million motherboards in 2015, which is a 10 percent drop compared to the last year and has lowered annual sales forecast to 18 million units.

Previously, both Gigabyte and ASUS expected to ship around 20 million motherboard this year. Whle ASUS did not reach is previously targeted volume, it did saw a big sale boost in November, raising revenue by 21 percent compared to the last month while Gigabyte was not so lucky and saw a drop of 13.6 percent during the same month.

The drop in sales had a more serious impact on other companies like MSI, Elitegroup and Biostar, which felt a bigger hit. Chinese motherboard supplier Onda is expected to completely pull out of the motherboard market next year.

While the launch of Intel 6th generation Skylake CPUs did gave the motherboard market a certain boost, it failed to reach earlier expectations. In the end, Skylake performance was not as impressive as expected so most PC users with earlier hardware decided to wait for the next CPU refresh. Intel's Skylake platform brought plenty of improvements, including DDR4 memory and M.2 slot, which also made the upgrade a bit more expensive, forcing users to postpone it.

The same report suggests that while some users might be willing to upgrade their systems next year, the motherboard sales will drop for another 10 percent in 2016.



Source: via Tweaktown.com.