The report, which we felt could have done with a few more car chases, has the imaginative title "Taiwan server shipment forecast and industry analysis" and was based around beancounters at Digitimes Research adding up some numbers, divided by their shoe size.

They claimed that next year will be good too thanks mostly to the arrival of Intel's new Purley-based products which will begin shipping in the second quarter of 2017 and the fact that demand for data center servers will continue to rise.

Digitimes Research said there is a chance that sales will reach $18 billion in 2017. In 2017 worldwide server shipments are expected to grow eight percent year to reach nearly 12 million units (based on related motherboard shipments) and the volume is expected to reach 12.5 million units in 2017, up 4-5 percent on the year.

Purley-based server product shipments are expected to continue rising in both 2018 and 2019, worldwide server shipments will grow another eight percent in 2018.

Taiwan-based server suppliers are seeing rising demand from cloud computing industry and Digitimes Research thinks that this will boost their shipments by 7.4 percent in 2016.

The top two vendors in Taiwan, Inventec and Wistron (including Wiwynn), should be laughing all the way to the bank when their combined market share has risen from 42.1 percent in 2015 to 44.7 percent in 2016 and is expected to reach 47.2 percent in 2017.