Chipset makers see signs of seasonal upturn

VIA claimed a 6.4 per cent rise in sales revenue from July to August and claimed some success with its strategy of focusing on smaller more integrated devices, but compared to a year before sales were down by 31.1 per cent year-on-year from $81.92 million last August to $56.44 million this time around.

SiS, meanwhile claimed a record month for the company and was thankful of brisk business in Pentium 4 chipsets. VIA, of course, still has no Intel licence for the P4 chipsets it produces so sees many potential sales going SiS's way. SiS claims revenues worth $400 million during August.

SiS is looking forward to further boosts to its chipset business during the coming weeks and months thanks to Intel's recent price-cutting manoeuvres while VIA CEO and president Chen Wen-chi was left to rue the lack of agreement with Intel over VIA's own P4 chipset.

Chen claimed advantage on the AMD platform and could look forward to ramping up production of VIA's KT400 chipset while both SiS and upstart chipset player Nvidia were still to deliver their SiS746 and nForce 2 platforms for AMD processors in significant volumes.

VIA can expect to pick up sales away from its chipset business, however. It's low-cost C3 CPU appeared in Walmart's first sub $200 PC just yesterday and Chen pointed its integrated Eden platform as a significant revenue generator during Q4. µ