AMD is preparing the launch of the Radeon RX 7900 series of graphics cards for December 13th. And, of course, with recent launches being coated in uncertainty regarding availability, we are getting more rumors about what the availability could look like. According to Kyle Bennett, founder of HardOCP, we have information that AMD is allegedly preparing 200,000 Radeon RX 7900 SKUs for launch day. If the information is truthful, among the 200,000 launch-day SKUs, there should be 30,000 Made-by-AMD (MBA) cards, while the rest are AIB partner cards. This number indicates that AMD's market research has shown that there will be a great demand for these new GPUs and that the scarcity problem should be long gone.

A few days ago, we reported that the availability of the new AMD Radeon generation is reportedly scarce, with Germany receiving only 3,000 MBA designs and the rest of the EMEA region getting only 7,000 MBA SKUs as well. With today's rumor going around, we would like to know if this is correct and if more SKUs will circulate. America's region could receive most of the MBA designs, and AIB partners will take care of other regions. Of course, we must wait for tomorrow's launch and see how AMD plans to execute its strategy.

According to TrendForce's research, the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries rose by 6% QoQ to US$35.21 billion for 3Q22 as the release of the new iPhone series during the second half of the year generated significant stock-up activities across Apple's supply chain. However, the global economy shows weak performances, and factors such as China's policy on containing COVID-19 outbreaks and high inflation continue to impact consumer confidence. As a result, peak-season demand in the second half of the year has been underwhelming, and inventory consumption is proceeding slower than anticipated. This situation has led to substantial downward corrections to foundry orders as well. For 4Q22, TrendForce forecasts that the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries will register a QoQ decline, thereby terminating the boom of the past two years—when there was an uninterrupted trend of QoQ revenue growth.

Regarding individual foundries' performances in 3Q22, the group of the top five was led by TSMC, followed by Samsung, UMC, GlobalFoundries, and SMIC. Their collective global market share (in revenue terms) came to 89.6%. Most foundries were directly impacted by clients slowing down their stock-up activities or significantly correcting down their orders. Only TSMC was able to make a notable gain due to Apple's strong stock-up demand for the SoCs deployed in this year's new iPhone models. TSMC saw its revenue rise by 11.1% QoQ to US$20.16 billion, and the corresponding market share expanded to 56.1%. The growth was mainly attributed to the ≤7 nm nodes, whose share in the foundry's revenue had kept climbing and reached 54% in the third quarter. Conversely, Samsung actually experienced a slight QoQ drop of 0.1% in foundry revenue even though it had also benefited from the component demand related to the new iPhone series. Partially impacted by the weakening of the Korean won, Samsung's market share fell to 15.5%.

TrendForce reports that the recent easing of tight supply for components has led to rising shipments for enterprise servers. Furthermore, ODMs for the most part have been able to sustain the momentum of data center build-out with the demand from ByteDance and the tenders issued by Chinese telecom companies. Nevertheless, the performance of the enterprise SSD market on the whole has been impacted by falling NAND Flash prices. For 3Q22, the NAND Flash industry's enterprise SSD revenue dropped by 28.7% QoQ to US$5.22 billion. Furthermore, all enterprise SSD suppliers recorded a negative performance for the period as well.

Regarding individual enterprise SSD suppliers' revenue figures for 3Q22, Samsung posted around US$2.12 billion. Its market share also shrank to 40.6% from 44.5% in 2Q22. Samsung's performance was mainly dragged down by the decline in its NAND Flash ASP. In the aspect of product development, SSDs featuring 128L NAND Flash and PCIe 4.0 will remain Samsung's main offerings for enterprise storage during 2023.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card has been out since mid-November and is a great performer in many resolutions and titles. However, with NVIDIA setting its price tag at $1200, it is an expensive product to afford and represents a considerable price jump compared to older xx80 GPU generations. According to MyDrivers, NVIDIA could lower the price starting in mid-December, to better suit the needs of consumers and have a competitive product. With AMD's RDNA3-based graphics cards releasing in the following days, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX costing $999 is a direct competitor to GeForce RTX 4080. If NVIDIA plans to cut the massive MSRP of the RTX 4080, then we expect it to be in the range of Radeon RX 7900 XTX to create better market competition.

Of course, this is only wishful thinking and a rumor that MyDrivers has reported, so we have to wait until the middle of this month to find out if NVIDIA announces the alleged price cut.

TrendForce estimates that global shipments of VR devices will come to around 8.58 million units for 2022, showing a YoY drop of 5.3%. There are three notable factors behind the decline. First, the ongoing high inflation has been suppressing the consumer demand for end products this year. Second, VR brands have either opted to not release a new product this year or pushed back the schedule for releasing a new product. Lastly, the demand for Meta's Quest devices has been dampened by a significant pricing adjustment. As for 2023, TrendForce forecasts that global shipments of VR devices will bounce back to a total of 10.35 million units and show a YoY growth of 20.6%. New products including the Sony PS VR2 and the Meta Quest 3 are scheduled for release next year, so they are expected to be a significant demand driver.

Meta has been the most aggressive in committing resources into the VR/AR market. However, the effect of its attempt to offer hardware at a low price has been quite disproportionate to its massive investments in related technologies. Due to mounting cost pressure, Meta has adjusted its pricing strategy for Quest devices. The Meta Quest 2, in particular, is now priced at US$1,499, which is more than three times its previous price. On account of this price hike and its relatively short battery life, the Quest Pro will unlikely follow the footsteps of the Quest 2 with respect to maintaining a strong shipment growth momentum. TrendForce estimates that that shipments of the Quest Pro will reach just to the level of 250,000 units for 2022. Meta will have to wait until next year, when the Quest 3 hit the market, to again see a notable positive growth in its shipments of VR devices. TrendForce currently forecasts that Meta's shipments for 2023 will total around 7.25 million units.

According to data from Gartner, the semiconductor market is expected to decline by up to 3.6 percent in 2023, from a growth of 4 percent this year and 26.3 percent in 2021. This might not be surprising to those that have followed recent developments in the semiconductor market, but it also looks like revenue for 2023 will be closer to that of 2021. This might in part be related to higher costs of manufacturing, but consumer demand is expected to be down in 2023, largely due to less disposable income, related to the current situation with rising inflation and increasing costs elsewhere.

Gartner claims that the enterprise market has been relatively stable and the consulting firm isn't expecting the enterprise market to decline as much as the consumer market when it comes to semiconductor demand. That said, Gartner is expecting the memory market to decline by up to 16.2 percent in 2023, as there's already an oversupply in the market. Likewise, it expects that the NAND flash market will see a decline by up to 13.7 percent in 2023. What isn't clear is how this weaker demand will affect retail prices, but as we've already seen, the DRAM and NAND flash manufacturers have already hit the brakes, to try and prevent a price crash.

Intel's Sapphire Rapids CPUs are designed to represent the company's finest work for the server/enterprise and high-end desktop processor (HEDT) sector. According to Wccftech, we have an idea of the launch date and availability of the HEDT Sapphire Rapids Workstation counterparts, codenamed Fishhawk Falls. The Intel Sapphire Rapids-WS CPU and W790 motherboard unveil should happen on the 7th week of 2023, which means the 12th Feb - 18th Feb launch window. For availability, April of 2023 is scheduled to meet the needs of the upcoming HEDT clients. With a declining HEDT market, Intel is in no rush to deliver the CPUs, with priority being the server Sapphire Rapids designs.

As a reminder, the HEDT models should come with up to 56 cores and 112 threads, 105 MB of L3 cache, 350 W TDP, and 112 PCIe Gen 5.0 lanes. For memory, the platform support 8-channel DDR5-4400 (1DPC) / DDR5-4800 (2DPC) configurations with a capacity of up to 4 TB.

TrendForce's latest research finds that shipments of display panels used in notebook computers (NB panels) came to 13.5 million pieces (pcs) in this October, showing a MoM drop of 16.1% and a YoY drop of 45.0%. Based on TrendForce's tracking of NB panel shipments, this figure is a 10-year low for the month of October. Moving into 4Q22, TrendForce expects NB panel shipments to remain in a slump because of uncertainties in the global economy and inventory adjustments that are taking place across the entire supply chain. Fourth-quarter shipment figure is now estimated around 41.7 million pcs, reflecting a QoQ drop of 10.8% and a YoY drop of 45.9%.

TrendForce points out that from a historical perspective, this latest decline in NB panel shipments is part of the wider, multi-year cycle for global manufacturing. The cycle first begins with strong demand causing shortages and price hikes. Then, supply outpaces demand, thus leading to falling prices and inventory corrections. Looking back to 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic was at its height, the surging demand for notebook computers (NBs) caused a panel shortage. Then, even as more panel supply was released, NB brands continued to stock up due to worries about potential shortages of the key components. They allowed their panel inventories to keep climbing. Fast-forward to the recent period, the pandemic has eased, so the supply situation has improved as well. Furthermore, the demand and windfall associated with the effects of the pandemic have also subsided. What follows now is a series of large inventory corrections in the panel market, the kind of which is rarely seen on record in terms of the overall scale.

Based on the latest data and research, TrendForce has further corrected down the projected YoY growth rate of whole server shipments for 2023 to 2.8%. Three factors are behind this revision. First, lead time has started to return to its usual length for most orders related to server components from 3Q23 onward. Seeing this, server OEMs and cloud service providers (CSPs) have also begun to correct the component mismatch issue by lowering demand for items that are in excess while maintaining a constant inventory level for items that are still in tight supply. This development, in turn, has reduced the flow of server orders going to ODMs. Second, the wave of demand that was generated earlier from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is dissipating. Hence, expansion activities have cooled off noticeably for services such as video streaming, e-commerce, etc. Among CSPs, Meta, Google, and ByteDance (TikTok) have lowered their server procurement quantities for next year. Lastly, the global economic outlook has remained fairly negative, so companies across most industry sectors have formulated a more conservative expenditure plan and scaled back IT-related spending for next year.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced that in response to market conditions, the company is reducing DRAM and NAND wafer starts by approximately 20% versus fiscal fourth quarter 2022. These reductions will be made across all technology nodes where Micron has meaningful output. Micron is also working toward additional capex cuts. In calendar 2023, Micron now expects its year-on-year bit supply growth to be negative for DRAM, and in the single-digit percentage range for NAND.

Recently, the market outlook for calendar 2023 has weakened. In order to significantly improve total inventory in the supply chain, Micron believes that in calendar 2023, year-on-year DRAM bit supply will need to shrink and NAND bit supply growth will need to be significantly lower than previous estimates. "Micron is taking bold and aggressive steps to reduce bit supply growth to limit the size of our inventory. We will continue to monitor industry conditions and make further adjustments as needed," said Micron President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra. "Despite the near-term cyclical challenges, we remain confident in the secular demand drivers for our markets, and in the long term, expect memory and storage revenue growth to outpace that of the rest of the semiconductor industry."

Global market intelligence firm TrendForce reports that for 3Q22, the revenue of the whole DRAM industry dropped by 28.9% QoQ to US$18.19 billion. This decline is the second largest to the one that the industry experienced in 2008, when the global economy was rocked by a major financial crisis. Regarding the state of the DRAM market in 3Q22, the QoQ decline in contract prices widened to the range of 10~15% as the demand for consumer electronics continued to shrink. Server DRAM shipments, which had been on a relatively stable trend compared with shipments of other types of DRAM products, also slowed down noticeably from the previous quarter as buyers began adjusting their inventory levels.

Turning to individual DRAM suppliers' performances in 3Q22, the top three suppliers (i.e., Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron) all exhibited a QoQ drop in revenue. Samsung posted US$7.40 billion and a QoQ drop of 33.5%, which was the largest among the top three. SK hynix's revenue fell by 25.2% QoQ to around US$5.24 billion. As for Micron, its revenue came to around US$4.81 billion. Since Micron marks its fiscal quarters differently, its DRAM ASP showed a QoQ decline that was smaller than the ones suffered by the two Korean suppliers. And as a result of this, Micron's QoQ revenue decline was also the smallest among the top three. TrendForce points out that the top three are still maintaining a relatively high operating margin at this moment. Nevertheless, the inventory correction period that has started this year will last through the first half of next year, so they will experience a continuing squeeze on profit.

MPEG LA, LLC today announced measures to bring its pool license for Versatile Video Coding, or VVC (introduced to the market on January 27, 2022), into conformity with market realities that will free implementers to invest in VVC adoption. First, a waiver of royalties for standalone (not in or with hardware) VVC software products Sold (with or without compensation or consideration) to an End User is available to any VVC Licensee that commits to becoming a Licensor to MPEG LA's VVC License if they or their Affiliates presently or in the future have the right to license or sublicense VVC Essential Patents. Products to which the waiver applies will still benefit from coverage as licensed products under the VVC License.

Second, a 25% VVC royalty discount is available to any VVC Licensee that enters into and is compliant with MPEG LA's AVC Patent Portfolio License, HEVC Patent Portfolio License and VVC Patent Portfolio License.

Corsair Gaming, Inc. ("Corsair" or the "Company"), a leading global provider and innovator of high-performance gear for gamers and content creators, today announced financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2022. Andy Paul, Chief Executive Officer of Corsair, stated, "We achieved 10% sequential revenue growth from Q2 2022 to Q3 2022, while significantly reducing our channel inventory in what remains a challenging environment. Sales out levels from our Channel to Consumers were significantly above pre-pandemic levels in almost all product lines and were above the year ago level in many of our product categories.

As we mentioned in previous quarters, the self-built PC market has been held back over the past 2 years, as high demand for GPU cards from crypto miners caused GPU prices to rise and in some cases double. Now that Crypto mining can no longer utilize graphics cards as they used to, GPU demand has since normalized resulting in a decline in prices back to standard MSRP or below. We are already seeing the positive effects of this on the market.

According to TrendForce, global notebook shipments in 4Q22 are likely to decline to 42.9 million units, down 7.2% QoQ and 32.3% YoY, lower than the same period before the pandemic. In addition, market demand is affected by negative factors such as inventory, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and rising inflation, leading to a downward revision of notebook market shipments in 2022 to 189 million units, a 23% decline YoY, with the proportion of shipments in the first and second half of the year at 53:47, the first top-heavy scenario in the past ten years.

According to research, the structural imbalance between notebook market supply and demand remains unresolved at present, leading this year's notebook shipments to present a downward movement trend quarter by quarter. TrendForce believes, after current inventory pressure gradually returns to a healthy level, Chromebooks may be the first wave of products that will see a recovery in demand by 2Q23 and traditional cyclical growth momentum is expected to return to the market, with shipments set to rebound slightly from 14.44 million in 2022 to 16.2 million units.

Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids processors have faced multiple delays over the past few years. Built on Intel 7 manufacturing process, the CPU is supposed to bring new advances for Intel's clients and significant performance uplifts. However, TrendForce reports that the mass production of Sapphire Rapids processors will be delayed from Q4 of 2022 to the first half of 2023. The reason for this (yet another) delay is that the Sapphire Rapids MCC die is facing a meager yield on Intel 7 manufacturing technology, estimated to be at only 50-60% at the time of writing. Economically, this die-yielding percentage is not profitable for Intel since many dies are turning out to be defective.

This move will stop many OEMs and cloud service providers (CSPs) from rolling out products based on the Sapphire Rapids design and will have to delay it until next year's mass production. On the contrary, AMD is likely to reap the benefits of Intel's delay, and AMD's x86 server market share will jump from 15% in 2022 to 23% in 2023. Given that AMD ships processors with the highest core counts, many companies will opt for AMD's solutions in their data centers. With more companies being concerned by their TCO measures with rising energy costs, favors fall in the hand of single-socket servers.

Intel's third quarter financials that the company released yesterday, weren't exactly what you'd call stellar. This has put Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger in a bind, as he's been forced to announce cost cuts of US$3 billion annually, starting 2023, but that it'll grow to somewhere between US$8 to 10 billion by 2025. Although Gelsinger didn't reveal the specifics of what these cost cuts will entail, he did mention quite a few potentials, according to The Register. Gelisinger stated that Intel "need to balance increased investment in areas like leadership in [technology development], product, and capacity [at new plants under construction] in Ohio and Germany, with the efficiency measures elsewhere as we drive to have best in class structures."

Intel's CFO David Zinsner, told Barron's that the company will be cutting a "meaningful number" of employees from Intel's payroll. Zisner went on to say that Intel will also perform "portfolio cuts, right-sizing our support organizations, more stringent cost controls in all aspects of our spending, and improved sales and marketing efficiency". It sounds like almost no-one is safe at Intel, especially as portofolio cuts mean that some product lines will either be sold off, or simply just canned in favour of more profitable products. Intel is also betting hard on its IDM 2.0 strategy, where the company is decoupling its hardware and software design teams from its foundry business. Time will tell if this helps restart Intel as a business, but Gelsinger seems to believe that the changes he's implementing at Intel will help turn things around.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) has responded to the recent dramatic reports by Canalys, Gartner, and IDC showing a precipitous drop in Q3 2022 PC shipments. In addition, JPR is providing guidance on the impact to graphics chip and AIB shipments. Jon Peddie, president and founder of JPR, said, "Our advice to clients has been consistent since 2020: The pandemic boom was not a surge in demand brought about by real growth in the market. The PC market is now correcting itself after a period of extraordinary growth spurred on by spending from an overwhelming surge of users working from home."

Peddie continued, "People were forced to work at home in 2020 and 2021, and many needed equipment. As a result, PC sales surged. Those people have what they need, and some of them are going back to the office. They don't need new PCs, and won't for three to five years. So, we are back to the nominal growth of the PC market, which was, and will be again after two quarters' adjustment, tracking GNP growth."

The world is without a doubt entering a recession and now the first rumours of mass layoffs in the tech industry are starting. According to Bloomberg, Intel is considering laying off thousands of employees as a measure to cut costs, as its businesses are slowing down. Bloomberg is mainly citing the PC market, which the publication calls Intel's main business, although Intel's Client Computing Group (CCG) does a lot more than just selling PC chips, but the group was Intel's largest source of revenue in Q2 this year by quite some margin. That said, despite a revenue of US$7.7 billion in Q2, this was down 25 percent compared to 2021, which in all fairness was a record year for most companies in the PC industry.

According to Bloomberg, Intel had 113,700 employees as of July this year and the publication said Intel is considering cutting as much as 20 percent of its sales and marketing staff. Bloomberg is expecting Intel to be looking at reducing fixed costs by 10 to 15 percent, although this is unlikely to affect key parts of Intel's business units. Last quarter, most of Intel's business units made a healthy profit, but only the Network and Edge Group had a significant revenue increase over the same quarter in 2021, with most other groups being down significantly. The third quarter results aren't expected to improve upon things, something that appears to be reflected in Intel's share price, which is down over 50 percent in 2022. That said, all of Intel's competitors are in the same boat and it's likely that we'll see more news about companies that are considering trimming back on their expenses and staff numbers in the near future. Intel is scheduled to report its third quarter earnings on the 27th of October.

According to TrendForce research, rising inflation has weakened demand for consumer products, flattening the peak of peak season. In 3Q22, memory bit consumption and shipments continued to exhibit quarterly decline. Due to a significant decline in memory demand, terminal buyers also delayed purchases, leading to further escalation of supplier inventory pressure. At the same time, the strategies of various DRAM suppliers to increase their market share remain unchanged. There have been cases of "consolidated Q3/Q4 price negotiations" or "negotiating quantity before pricing" in the market, which are the reasons leading to a ballooning of declining DRAM prices to 13~18% in 4Q22.

In terms of PC DRAM, due to weak demand for notebooks, PC OEMs will remain focused on destocking DRAM inventory. While the DRAM supply side has not actually reduced production since operating profit remains favorable, bit output continues to rise and pressure on suppliers' inventory becomes increasingly obvious. From the perspective of DDR4 and DDR5, the price drop forecast in 4Q22 is 13~18% with DDR5 declining more than DDR4. However, as the penetration rate of DDR5 continues to rise, coupled with a higher unit price, the penetration rate of DDR5 in the PC DRAM sector will increase 13~15% in 4Q22, which will buoy the average unit price of overall PC DRAM (combined DDR5 and DDR4) marginally and PC DRAM pricing in 4Q22 is estimated to drop by approximately 10~15%.

During Evercore ISI TMT conference, Intel announced that the company would continue to lose market share, with a possible bounce back in the coming years. According to the latest report, Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger announced that he expects the company to continue to lose its market share to AMD as the competition has "too much momentum" going for it. AMD's Ryzen and EPYC processors continue to deliver power and efficiency performance figures, which drives customers towards the company. On the other hand, Intel expects a competing product, especially in the data center business with Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors, set to arrive in 2023. Pat Gelsinger noted, "Competition just has too much momentum, and we haven't executed well enough. So we expect that bottoming. The business will be growing, but we do expect that there continues to be some share losses. We're not keeping up with the overall TAM growth until we get later into '25 and '26 when we start regaining share, material share gains."

The only down years that are supposed to show a toll of solid competition are 2022 and 2023. As far as creating a bounceback, Intel targets 2025 and 2026. "Now, obviously, in 2024, we think we're competitive. 2025, we think we're back to unquestioned leadership with our transistors and process technology," noted CEO Gelsinger. Additionally, he had a say about the emerging Arm CPUs competing for the same server market share as Intel and AMD do so, stating that "Well, when we deliver the Forest product line, we deliver power performance leadership versus all Arm alternatives, as well. So now you go to a cloud service provider, and you say, 'Well, why would I go through that butt ugly, heavy software lift to an ARM architecture versus continuing on the x86 family?"

According to the latest TrendForce statistics, revenue of the top ten global IC design houses reached US$39.56 billion in 2Q22, growing 32% YoY. Growth was primarily driven by demand for data centers, networking, IoT, and high-end product portfolios. AMD achieved synergy through mergers and acquisitions. In addition to climbing to third place, the company also posted the highest annual revenue growth rate in 2Q22 at 70%.

Qualcomm continues in the No. 1 position worldwide, exhibiting growth in the mobile phone, RF front-end, automotive, and IoT sectors. Sales of mid/low-end mobile phone APs were weak but demand for high-end mobile phone APs was relatively stable. Company revenue reached US$9.38 billion, or 45% growth YoY. NVIDIA benefitted from expanded application of GPUs in data centers to expand this product category's revenue share past the 50% mark to 53.5%, making up for the 13% YoY slump in its game application business, bringing total revenue to US$7.09 billion, though annual growth rate slowed to 21%. AMD reorganized its business after the addition of Xilinx and Pensando. The company's embedded division revenue increased by 2,228% YoY. In addition, its data center department also made a considerable contribution. AMD posted revenue of US$6.55 billion, achieving 70% growth YoY, highest amongst the top ten. Broadcom's sales performance in semiconductor solutions remained solid and demand for cloud services, data centers, and networking is quite strong. The company's purchase order backlog is still increasing with 2Q22 revenue reaching US$6.49 billion, an annual growth rate of 31%.

According to the latest TrendForce investigations, moving into the second half of 3Q22, the lack of a peak season has led to a delay in inventory destocking. Transactions in the NAND Flash market have been frosty. Buyers are watching passively and tend not to negotiate pricing. Pressure on factory inventory has reached a breaking point and manufacturers are bottoming out pricing in order to make a deal. This move will lead to a further decline in manufacturer pricing. TrendForce once again revises downward 3Q22 NAND Flash wafer contract prices and the decline of pricing is estimated to balloon to 30-35% from the original estimate of 15-20%.

In the past two years, the pandemic has promoted digital transformation and notebook computers and servers have stimulated rapid growth in NAND Flash consumption. In order to satisfy demand, manufacturers have been expanding aggressively, with their processes accelerating the output of 128-layer+ products. However, the 2H22 NAND Flash market situation has deteriorated sharply with the acute correction in purchase order demand for smartphones and laptops indicative of a market oversupply. Looking forward to 2023, the conservative attitudes of various consumer electronics brands may lead to difficulties in improving market conditions in the next year and stimulate suppliers to step up efforts to seize market share.

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX) (the "Company" or "Seagate"), a world leader in data storage and infrastructure solutions, today announced that it is lowering its business outlook for the fiscal first quarter ending September 30, 2022, against a worsening macro-economic backdrop. Seagate now expects fiscal first quarter revenue of $2.1 billion plus or minus $100 million, which compares to the Company's previous guidance range of $2.5 billion plus or minus $150 million.

"Since our earnings call in mid-July, weaker economic trends in certain Asian regions have amplified customer inventory corrections and supply chain disruptions. We have also seen more cautious buying behavior among global Enterprise / OEM and certain U.S. cloud customers amid ongoing macro-economic uncertainties. These external factors are impacting near-term mass capacity demand while continuing to weigh on the consumer centric legacy markets," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chief executive officer.

In President Biden's first year in office, the Biden-Harris Administration has implemented an industrial strategy to revitalize domestic manufacturing, create good-paying American jobs, strengthen American supply chains, and accelerate the industries of the future. These policies have spurred an historic recovery in manufacturing, adding 642,000 manufacturing jobs since 2021. Companies are investing in America again, bringing good-paying manufacturing jobs back home. The construction of new manufacturing facilities has increased 116 percent over last year.

Today, President Biden will sign into law the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which will build on this progress, making historic investments that will poise U.S. workers, communities, and businesses to win the race for the 21st century. It will strengthen American manufacturing, supply chains, and national security, and invest in research and development, science and technology, and the workforce of the future to keep the United States the leader in the industries of tomorrow, including nanotechnology, clean energy, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence. The CHIPs and Science Act makes the smart investments so that American to compete in and win the future.

Corsair Gaming, Inc. ("Corsair" or the "Company"), a leading global provider and innovator of high-performance gear for gamers and content creators, today announced financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022. Andy Paul, Chief Executive Officer of Corsair, stated, "Headwinds from Q1 persisted through Q2, which is seasonally the lowest quarter for us, with macro-economic headwinds affecting consumer spending on gaming gear, especially in Europe combined with global inflation, the continued Russia and Ukraine conflict, and high freight costs. This resulted in a buildup of inventory both in our warehouses as well as in the retail channel, thus causing our channel partners to delay ordering while they clear this stock.

Despite the challenging environment, we continue to see positive underlying growth trends in the gaming hardware sector, and we see spending levels significantly above pre -pandemic levels. We are also starting to see more enthusiasts building gaming PCs again as graphics cards are now more readily available at reasonable prices. We saw very positive signs during Amazon Prime week, with component activity significantly higher than in 2021, both in Europe as well as in the United States. While we are disappointed with the lower results in Q2, we are very pleased to see positive market activity recently and with our channel inventory moving back into line during Q2 and Q3 2022, we expect demand for our products to recover well as we finish the year and look forward to an exciting 2023."