There are currently a billion people confined to their homes, keeping a quarantine unseen in modern history.
Companies have had to send their workers home, all because of a new Coronavirus that is plaguing us. The giants of the CPU sector are not immune and by means of a letter to their partners they have tried to calm the CPU shortage that we have been warning for a little over three weeks, will there be enough supply for everyone?
The current situation is something that no one who is alive has ever seen, not even the oldest. The Coronavirus is putting incredible pressure on both markets and factories and companies, to the point that Bob Swan and Lisa Su have had to step up as CEOs of their respective companies to try to calm the industry down.
Although in Europe, practically the entire population is at home because of the quarantine and this is repeated in other neighboring countries, as well as until recently in China and where in addition one in 5 Americans already has to follow the same path, world demand has not it stops.
The load of data servers has increased exponentially, companies like Netflix or even YouTube are lowering the quality of their streams to meet the needs of a population confined to their homes and who wants to entertain themselves more than ever.
For this reason, Tomshardware says that the demand for processors worldwide continues to escalate, where their capacity is not being sufficient for the whirlwind of data that the world is going through.
Not surprisingly, 99% of world servers are captained by Intel or AMD, so the supply of these is essential to be able to expand infrastructures at a time as delicate as the one we are going through.
On the one hand, Bob Swan has written to his clients and has cited the company’s pandemic team as the primary weapon to maintain the supply chain. At the same time, he cited that global manufacturing is very well distributed and that is why the company is operating at almost full capacity, where it maintains a 90% on-time delivery rate.
For its part, AMD did not refer to the supply chain as such, but rather ensured that its company is actively working to maintain business continuity and thereby mitigate the impact of the operations being carried out in various parts of the world. At the same time, they are taking steps to ensure the safety of their employees during the outbreak.
You just have to look at the evolution of the main stores in our country and even at the European level, where we have been weeks without availability of certain processor models and even, some no longer have their own CPUs for sale.
With this, third-party vendors are taking advantage of the current CPU shortage that we live and that, apparently, will still be around for many months. Not surprisingly, last week we already reported a 30% drop in PC sales and where giants like ASUS had already lost -40% of quarterly shipments due to zero demand.
Therefore, it would not be surprising that when everything returns to normal prices have a rebound effect on the sector, just as it happens on the stock market. We will have to be vigilant.