Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2002/08/02/via_finds_comfort_in_july/

VIA finds comfort in July sales

Could have been worse

By Drew Cullen

Posted in Channel, 2nd August 2002 16:54 GMT

VIA Technologies yesterday released its sales figures for July, totting up at US $53m. This is 28 per cent down on July'01, but 18.48 per cent up on June'02.

The Taiwanese chipset producer prefers to look at the June jump rather than the July year-on-year fall. Last month's sales reflect "continued strong execution across all our product lines despite the uncertain market conditions," according to Richard Brown, Director of Marketing at VIA Technologies, Inc.

He expresses confidence that the company will succeed in executing its Product Canaan programme, designed to diversify the firm's product set and lessen its reliance on chipsets.

Chipsets at one point accounted for 80 per cent of VIA's turnover. But it has SiS snapping at its heels, AMD, on whose mobo OEMs it leans on heavily for sales, losing market share in the last month or two, and Intel showing no sign of mercy in the legal war with over VIA rights to produce P4 chipsets.

Project Canaan will see VIA ship more audio chips, recruit OEMs to build cheap PCs and set-top boxes for the developing world, sell more products such as the mini-ITX board into the embedded electronics world, and, if push comes, to shove, make and market product direct, if it can't find the OEMs.

All well and good, but it's going to be a very rocky transition, while it continues to lose chipset market share. ®