Lin Kunde, vice president of Biostar, said at the conference today that its industrial computer revenue continued to grow, reaching about 200 million yuan last year and reaching 180 million yuan in the first half of this year. (Photo by reporter Fang Weijie)
[Reporter Fang Weijie/Report from Taipei] Board manufacturer Biostar (2399) is actively promoting the transformation of its product structure. Vice President Lin Kunde said at the press conference today that its industrial computer (IPC) revenue continued to grow. Last year, it was about 200 million yuan. In the first half of this year, it has Reaching 180 million yuan, if the performance in the first and second half of the year is similar, the full year is expected to reach about 360 million yuan, an annual increase of about 80%. Currently, there is a large-scale smart city project in North America and South America that has entered the mature stage. The relevant verification is close to completion and is expected to continue to ferment next year.
Lin Kunde pointed out that the current large-scale IPC projects that are relatively mature include one customer each in North America and South America. The relevant verifications are almost complete and are expected to be passed next year. Among them, South America is a government project, and North America is a large enterprise customer. After Biostar supplies the products, the customer will then integrate the terminal application and sell it. The application areas mainly fall in smart city fields such as Digital Signage (Digital Signage) to Platform as a Service (PaaS).
In recent years, Biostar has continued to reduce the proportion of consumer motherboard business and shift to the IPC market with higher gross profit margins. Lin Kunde said that in terms of product gross profit margin, IPC currently has the highest, followed by graphics cards and motherboards. IPC revenue has also continued to show quarterly and annual growth. However, in the past, the base period of motherboard revenue was relatively large, so the growth of IPC at this stage still cannot fully compensate for the decline of motherboards.
As for the subsequent performance of motherboards, Lin Kunde believes that based on the current situation, the related business has gradually stabilized and "will not continue." However, it is difficult to regain significant growth, so the proportion of IPC in overall revenue will continue to increase in the future. Biostar's IPC revenue this year accounts for about 20%, and the company continues to move towards increasing it to 50%.
In terms of IPC application layout, Biostar has targeted the three major areas of smart manufacturing, smart cities and smart retail. In terms of smart manufacturing, the products are equipped with NVIDIA Jetson system-on-chip (SoC) and Intel's new platform, and are optimistic about the demand brought by the promotion of AI and computing infrastructure in the Middle East; smart cities cover traffic control, monitoring and other applications, and the smart retail market continues to promote vending machine and related terminal projects in South Korea, Japan and other places.
However, component prices are still an uncertain factor from the second half of the year to next year. Lin Kunde said that memory prices have risen again since October, and the increase in DDR prices has caused some customers to re-evaluate the system construction schedule. Unlike consumer products, which can stimulate demand through price cuts, industrial application customers mainly still build based on actual needs. Biostar products and market layout are currently ready to be completed, and the fermentation of customer projects will be observed in the future.
There are also variables in CPU supply. Lin Kunde said that the CPU supply situation in the fourth quarter has improved slightly compared with the previous one. However, the production capacity configuration of Intel and AMD in the first quarter of next year will still be biased towards applications such as AI, Big Core and data centers. CPUs used in IPC and consumer computers may once again face tight supply. The number of CPUs currently obtained by Biostar has not fully met the demand, so some of the supply obtained in the fourth quarter must still be reserved for next year.
