According to Digitimes, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock really had an Annus horribilis. ASRock saw shipments dip by 55 per cent year from around six million units in 2021 to 2.7 million last year. MSI shipped 9.5 million boards in 2021 but sold 5.5 million in 2022, a decline of more than 42 per cent.

Asus fared a bit better, from 18 million boards shipped in 2021 to 13.6 million last year (about a 25 per cent drop), while Gigabyte realized a 14 per cent drop from 11 million units shipped to around 9.5 million.

Poor motherboard sales seem to match the general problems facing the PC market. Mercury Research said the fourth quarter of 2022 played host to the biggest dip in PC processor shipments in three decades and mirrored a similar result from earlier in the year.

Mercury ultimately concluded that 2022 represented the largest slump ever in the PC CPU industry, with only 374 million CPUs shipped for the full year. That is 21 percent fewer than were shipped in 2021 and notably does not include Arm processors.