System news
Mark Williams takes another look at how the PC industry is coping with the continued demands due to the coronavirus.
As COVID-19 continues to affect our daily lives, so too does it continue to impact PC retailers, shops, and supply chains. At the beginning of last month, I placed an order at a large PC retailer. It was a couple thousand dollars worth of equipment for the company I work for. Nothing exotic or out of the ordinary, simply common PC components like CPUs and memory and SSDs, right through to monitor cables. All things that, according to their website, were available and in stock at the time.
Now, given the size of the order I was expecting it might take 3-4 days to pick everything and get it shipped out, but as time ticked by after a week only about half the items had been allocated to my order. It was not until 12-14 days after placing the order did everything finally get allocated and shipped out!
Not only is this an indicator of just how busy the PC industry is from the increased demand due to the COVID-19-related sales spike, but Jaimie from Leader Computers also mentions that those places will be having a hard time sourcing parts and maintaining stock levels due to the lack of international freight flights to keep themselves stocked.
In fact, air freight has become so cost prohibitive due to the huge decline in the numbers of flights – not to mention horribly unreliable or irregular – that they’re having to switch to “sea freight on gear [which] has added a good two weeks to lead times across the smaller items such as RAM and SSDs for example. Airfreight at one stage was six times the normal cost, people were paying $18k to ship one Pallet via air, normally around $3k!”
Jaimie goes on to mention that much of the demand has shifted away from the fundamental stuff like PC systems/laptops and monitors that were in high demand at the beginning of the COVID-19 working from home boom, to more networking capacity upgrades and security devices like routers, and VPNcapable switching gear.
And while that may well be true, shortages are still persisting for system parts.
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed most X570 motherboards were out of stock or hard to come by. This seems to have been resolved at the time of writing, but now Threadripper and Intel 10th Gen CPUs and TRX40 motherboards are in short supply.
The shortages and unreliable stock levels seems to have even taken a toll on Scorptec’s pre-built PC systems line-up with less than 30% of their range being available to order, and even then, only in limited quantities.
While the high demand remains along with the strained supply channels, Jaimie seems confident that we won’t see demand like we had back in March, with the initial surge of the working from home paradigm shift the economy was forced to take, but demand will remain elevated for quite some time as “many businesses shift to a more flexible work platform allowing work from home for certain roles, as it can reduce their overheads significantly in other areas such as commercial real estate and power etc. This may drive a strong wave of investment over the next quarter.”