Gigabyte Will Allegedly Lay Off Sales and Marketing Staff

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
Staff member
Joined
Mar 3, 2018
Messages
1,713
A recent report from Digitimes claims that Gigabyte Technology is facing weak GPU and Motherboard demand in 2019. As a consequence, they're allegedly "planning to cut its sales and marketing expenses for 2019 and will axe 5-10% of its personnel in the first half of 2019." The "market observers" claim that Gigabyte's motherboard business will be the primary target of the layoffs, and that there are no plans to reduce the workforce in the graphics card division. Facing the same grim market forecasts, Asus and MSI have also "tightened up control of their expenses." though a previous report claims that they won't be hit as hard as Gigabyte, Biostar and ECS.

Gigabyte shipped around 2.2 million motherboards in the fourth quarter of 2018, with its 2018 motherboard shipments reaching 11.45 million units, down from 2017's 12.6 million and 2016's 16 million. For 2019, Gigabyte is expected to focus on maintaining its volumes at above 10 million units. Gigabyte shipped around 3.5 million graphics cards in 2016 and 4.8 million units in 2017 thanks to strong contribution from cryptocurrency mining demand. In 2018, the shipments had been sliding every quarter, dropping from the first quarter's 1.2 million to the second quarter's 850,000, the third quarter's 750,000 and the fourth quarter's 700,000, returning Gigabyte's annual shipments in 2018 back to the level of 2016 at around 3.5 million units.
 
It happens. The landscape eventually changes with any business. I still have an Abit motherboard floating around for some reason. The Crypto bubble was artificial on so many levels that these sorts of corrections are to be expected until the next one.
 
Honestly my gigabyte board is underwhelming and my Asus and MSI boards have been shitty several times in a row, and all of their software is horrendous. Hoping Asrock is better?
 
I wonder if nVidia has finally found the magical price point people won't pay. It will take a while to find out, the hype has to die down first.

Honestly my gigabyte board is underwhelming and my Asus and MSI boards have been shitty several times in a row, and all of their software is horrendous. Hoping Asrock is better?

I had a horrendous run with Asus motherboards, so bad that I stopped buying them for a long time. I recently had to dive back in with Asus for itx because they made the only board with two m.2 slots on them and I've been thrilled.
 
If Zen 2 can use x370 and 470 moboes this May/June that's another group of geeks that don't have to buy new moboes. On the GPU front, Nvidia didn't help matters by making current gen so $$$ which just added another deterrent to upgraders - especially those with good Pascal setups already. Unless Navi performance can incentivize some upgrades mid-2019 (even if its at the low / medium end and not the ultra high end), I don't see AIBs making gains. And I don't see Nvidia's product line and pricing strategy changing anytime soon either, so no contribution from there.
 
Well, this is what happens when you get market saturation as well as the minuscule performance improvements over the past 5+ years.

The crypto-bubble popping isn't helping either.

The sales numbers of motherboards have been inflated along with CPUs, GPUs, RAM, and PSUs for the past few years.
Now the miners are dumping them for pretty cheap on eBay and other market places and those who have really old systems find it much cheaper to buy slightly used parts.
 
The real news for me is that ECS still makes motherboards. I didn't realize they're still in that market. I had one of their boards for my Duron.

not really that surprised.. they make a lot of OEM boards along with the stuff they sell at Fry's. they also make Acer laptops.

also i feel all the motherboard manufactures are doing this to themselves, they release so many damn variations of the same board.

this is just gigabyte, asus is even worse.
z390 14 different motherboards..
x299 13 motherboards
z370 20 motherboards
x470 4 motherboards
b450 6 motherboards
x370/b350/a320 27 motherboards..

way to confuse the shit out of your customers.. what happened to the days where you had 1 or 2 high end boards, 1 or 2 mid range and then a completely shit oem style board from each board manufacture. half the time you can't even tell what the differences are between them without reading the 10 page long feature list of each board side by side.

Not likely, since ASrock is ASUS's "budget" brand.

ASrock is it's own brand and have been owned by Pegatron since 2010.
 
Last edited:
It happens. The landscape eventually changes with any business. I still have an Abit motherboard floating around for some reason.

Nice - I still have an Abit Quad GT board with a Q6600. I still have a (mostly) working collection of socket A and P4 SOYO motherboards.

I'm sure complexity is a factor, but the reliability / build quality of motherboards from the past 10 years seems to be down compared to some of these older parts.

Sales down, lays off people responsible for pitching the product out and about to the masses..... Brilliant!

If Gigabyte is firing any of the people responsible for the Aurous branding, then I am all for it.

Years ago, I bought a bunch of their X58 parts that were well built, clean design, and no BS. The only similar board gigabyte produces like that today is the X399 Designare. All the other motherboards Gigabyte sells now are covered in RGB Aurous eagles. I actually tried purchasing one of these Designare boards - I owned it for just over a week before returning it due to the terrible support / lack of BIOS updates. Gigabyte needs to stop branding their parts like they are marketing to 10 year olds and spend some more money on their BIOS and driver teams.
 
Not likely, since ASrock is ASUS's "budget" brand.
That hasn't been the case for a while *shrugs*

I will say that on the server side, Asus IPMI user interface is probably the best that I've used outside of the major server venders, yep...random.
 
When I was picking out a x470 for my last build (ended up with a Asrock Taichi), I honestly couldn't tell the difference (besides price) of the boards that I was looking at. They all had the latest Realtek sound chips (12xx), built in wifi, gig ethernet ... the differences ended up being in the ad text - gold caps / Nichikons, cooling plates on the mobo or m.2 slots or copper layers in the mobo or other random miscellaneous crap. Stuff that may not actually even do anything tangible but add to the cost of the board.
 
not really that surprised.. they make a lot of OEM boards along with the stuff they sell at Fry's. they also make Acer laptops.

also i feel all the motherboard manufactures are doing this to themselves, they release so many damn variations of the same board.

this is just gigabyte, asus is even worse.
z390 14 different motherboards..
x299 13 motherboards
z370 20 motherboards
x470 4 motherboards
b450 6 motherboards
x370/b350/a320 27 motherboards..

way to confuse the shit out of your customers..



ASrock is it's own brand and have been owned by Pegatron since 2010.
LOL, yeah. Asus' website lists just for the Intel platform... 143 motherboards. Most of which they don't even make anymore, but they still include "where to buy". Just ATX z390 boards alone, they have TWELVE. That's not even including e-atx. I understand wanting to include a range of products to get the low-end(prime z390-p at $150) to the upper end(ROG maximus formula XI at $450) but do they really need something at every $10-$20 for just one chipset? There has to be a point when you've got just too many SKUs, retailers can't actually keep up with every make/model, and having 10 redundant variants sitting in the channel doesn't accomplish anything.
 
LOL, yeah. Asus' website lists just for the Intel platform... 143 motherboards. Most of which they don't even make anymore, but they still include "where to buy". Just ATX z390 boards alone, they have TWELVE. That's not even including e-atx. I understand wanting to include a range of products to get the low-end(prime z390-p at $150) to the upper end(ROG maximus formula XI at $450) but do they really need something at every $10-$20 for just one chipset? There has to be a point when you've got just too many SKUs, retailers can't actually keep up with every make/model, and having 10 redundant variants sitting in the channel doesn't accomplish anything.

This
Plus you never know which boards in the lineup are going to get more support. If you buy a less popular one, etc they might not provide BIOS updates as often
 
not really that surprised.. they make a lot of OEM boards along with the stuff they sell at Fry's. they also make Acer laptops.

also i feel all the motherboard manufactures are doing this to themselves, they release so many damn variations of the same board.

this is just gigabyte, asus is even worse.
z390 14 different motherboards..
x299 13 motherboards
z370 20 motherboards
x470 4 motherboards
b450 6 motherboards
x370/b350/a320 27 motherboards..

way to confuse the shit out of your customers.. what happened to the days where you had 1 or 2 high end boards, 1 or 2 mid range and then a completely shit oem style board from each board manufacture. half the time you can't even tell what the differences are between them without reading the 10 page long feature list of each board side by side.



ASrock is it's own brand and have been owned by Pegatron since 2010.

I entertained the idea of building a new PC this year with tax returns. Trying to find a processor and motherboard to start with turned me off from the whole ordeal. I'll wait till something drastically dies in my rig.
 
Nope. No recession in sight...

Edit: but to keep it on topic, I bought a Gigabyte board with my 7820X. Total junk. For the first couple months I had hard reboots while... plotting data in python. That's right. The simple act of plotting even a few data points would cause a hard crash. This was true in both Ubuntu and Windows 10.

Eventually Gigabyte got around to releasing a BIOS update, and that fixed the issue. If I recall correctly, it was a microcode issue with the Skylake X chips, that "only affected a small proportion of users".

While it wasn't Gigabyte's product that caused the crash, I can't figure out why you would release a motherboard without the requisite microcode updates on deck and ready to roll.
 
It happens. The landscape eventually changes with any business. I still have an Abit motherboard floating around for some reason. The Crypto bubble was artificial on so many levels that these sorts of corrections are to be expected until the next one.
I'll see your Abit and raise you a DFI nf4 Ultra board.

At least they're laying off talking heads and not engineers, there's that...
 
You guys are all spot on with the market saturation. It's literally kept me from making the jump from "add to cart" to "Purchase". I feel like I need to make a giant spreadsheet comparing all the different mfg boards. I know what I want, need, and can afford, but I hate finding out after buying something if I spent $x more I could have had THIS cool feature, or could have saved $x amount because I bought that feature and will never use it.

And you can't seem to find a board with premium components/heatsinks without RGB. I don't even want the shit in my box.
 
Not likely, since ASrock is ASUS's "budget" brand.

This isn't the case.

As for the new here, I've seen cut backs from the marketing and PR staff at these companies for years. I've seen a lot of faces disappear from these companies and end up somewhere else. The desktop PC is a niche piece of hardware these days. We've also had a stagnant processor market for quite some time with no real reason to upgrade for the purpose of gaming. You aren't in horrible shape rocking a Core i7 2600K with a decent overclock today if you have a modern GPU in it. Its not surprising GPU shipments are strong and are becoming GIGABYTE's focus. These companies have done a lot to diversify their product portfolios over the last several years. This is why they want to get into high margin products like mice, keyboards and monitors.
 
This is a motherboard rant in general

I just wish I didn't have to consult multiple review sites and tear-down videos to figure out what motherboards are using 'true' VRM phases. What ones are using doublers. What ones are just flagrantly lying about how many and what quality phases they have.

That and trying to determine the quality of the other components, how the memory lanes are laid out, ect... This is stuff that can be simply said on a spec sheet and usually is.

It's just that the motherboard market is just getting away with effectively false advertising for years. Lying about how their boards are configured. I don't trust ANY of the vendors on their spec sheets. Thus, only ones I can trust are not brands, but what gets reviewed and looks good.

(by a competent reviewer that tears down the board to find out just what is hiding under those fancy sometimes-functional heatsyncs, but that's another rant entirely)

That and the whole stagnation in market for the last oh... 5-7 years. And the fact that AM4 isn't helping them as AMD isn't in bed with forcing socket changes for no reason.

Speaking on AM4, make a bloody high end or at least competent boards in the mATX form factor. There are no X470 mATX boards, and of the B450 ones, only a handful by MSI of all people are worth even considering IMO, given the shit components the rest of the vendors are using (including Gigabyte), and/or lying again on their spec sheets.

The motherboard makers are going to be in a for a shock over the next few years if they don't shape up, start being honest about the specs of their boards, and start making boards with quality components / features that are worth an upgrade. That includes fixing their software.
 
Another problem with the market is the sheer volume of motherboard models produced by some of these companies. Many of them don't need to exist as they have only superficial differences with another model. In some cases you have a model with a different color scheme and network controller. That's it. These companies spend too much money developing overlapping products and their marketing has reached a point where you have brand dilution and it no longer makes sense. ASUS used to have model numbers for motherboards. A suffice like Deluxe or Premium was added to that letting you know what level of board it was. Now, for ROG alone ASUS had to release an information graphic that shows how ROG works. It shows how STRIX fits in etc. Other series like the TUF series used to be premium offerings that were cut down to bargain basement options.

MSI's Grenade, Mortar, etc. make no fucking sense without a flow chart to tell you whats what. GIGABYTE is somewhat easier to understand, but they are the ones guilty of changing a motherboards color and slapping a different network controller on the board and charging more for it. I've reviewed a lot of motherboards from the same company that are so similar, I can barely tell them apart. I've even had some of these side by side and its taken quite a while to spot the differences between them.

I think some of these companies should get back to basics and cut the fluff out of their lineups. They could also offer motherboards without so much integrated bullshit and cut production costs even more. Many enthusiasts don't want onboard audio or even networking if the latter is going to be shitty. I'd like to see these motherboard makers cut that bullshit out rather than cost cutting their VRM designs more and more.
 
Another problem with the market is the sheer volume of motherboard models produced by some of these companies. Many of them don't need to exist as they have only superficial differences with another model. In some cases you have a model with a different color scheme and network controller. That's it. These companies spend too much money developing overlapping products and their marketing has reached a point where you have brand dilution and it no longer makes sense. ASUS used to have model numbers for motherboards. A suffice like Deluxe or Premium was added to that letting you know what level of board it was. Now, for ROG alone ASUS had to release an information graphic that shows how ROG works. It shows how STRIX fits in etc. Other series like the TUF series used to be premium offerings that were cut down to bargain basement options.

MSI's Grenade, Mortar, etc. make no fucking sense without a flow chart to tell you whats what. GIGABYTE is somewhat easier to understand, but they are the ones guilty of changing a motherboards color and slapping a different network controller on the board and charging more for it. I've reviewed a lot of motherboards from the same company that are so similar, I can barely tell them apart. I've even had some of these side by side and its taken quite a while to spot the differences between them.

I think some of these companies should get back to basics and cut the fluff out of their lineups. They could also offer motherboards without so much integrated bullshit and cut production costs even more. Many enthusiasts don't want onboard audio or even networking if the latter is going to be shitty. I'd like to see these motherboard makers cut that bullshit out rather than cost cutting their VRM designs more and more.

I'm fairly into this stuff and I've been guilty of looking for a motherboard manufacturer that has a simpler product stack. I can imagine that people less interested in this stuff just get baffled.
 
Another problem with the market is the sheer volume of motherboard models produced by some of these companies. Many of them don't need to exist as they have only superficial differences with another model. In some cases you have a model with a different color scheme and network controller. That's it. These companies spend too much money developing overlapping products and their marketing has reached a point where you have brand dilution and it no longer makes sense. ASUS used to have model numbers for motherboards. A suffice like Deluxe or Premium was added to that letting you know what level of board it was. Now, for ROG alone ASUS had to release an information graphic that shows how ROG works. It shows how STRIX fits in etc. Other series like the TUF series used to be premium offerings that were cut down to bargain basement options.

MSI's Grenade, Mortar, etc. make no fucking sense without a flow chart to tell you whats what. GIGABYTE is somewhat easier to understand, but they are the ones guilty of changing a motherboards color and slapping a different network controller on the board and charging more for it. I've reviewed a lot of motherboards from the same company that are so similar, I can barely tell them apart. I've even had some of these side by side and its taken quite a while to spot the differences between them.

I think some of these companies should get back to basics and cut the fluff out of their lineups. They could also offer motherboards without so much integrated bullshit and cut production costs even more. Many enthusiasts don't want onboard audio or even networking if the latter is going to be shitty. I'd like to see these motherboard makers cut that bullshit out rather than cost cutting their VRM designs more and more.

I agree with all of this. Also, pretty much every Gigabyte board I've had since like ~2003 has either died or had some kind of stupid issue, BIOS corruption etc etc. Always, never had anywhere near these kinds of issue with Asus/Asrock/MSI or even Biostar.
 
^ the good ole days when you could buy PCI cards for everything, and the video card didn't cover up half the PCI slots you had!
 
They all need to get their shit together! I suggest that they do the following summarizing what others said above.

- reduce model range to a meaningful number. I.e. 4 models for each chipset MAX
- improve quality to reflect prices across the board
- Produce software that Actually works (shitty state right now and lots of non-working gimmicks)
- Consolidate the protocols for RGB to ONE for all motherboards and come out with a common software control platform! A lot of wasted money for the RGB chaos you have brought to the market right now.
 
This is a motherboard rant in general

I just wish I didn't have to consult multiple review sites and tear-down videos to figure out what motherboards are using 'true' VRM phases. What ones are using doublers. What ones are just flagrantly lying about how many and what quality phases they have.

Using four true VRM phases isn't necessarily better than having 8 via phase doublers. In fact, phase doubling has been a very normal part of motherboard VRM design for years. Its not a bad thing. Beyond that, its even hard for us reviewers as the manufacturers don't tell us very much. They want to keep as much of their design a secret as they can. ASUS is the only one to lie about their phase count as far as I know. This was a recent development and they've been called out on it. As for quality, the main manufacturers generally do a good job. Their designs are different with pros and cons in various cases. You can also argue that overbuilding your VRMs isn't particularly useful when a lesser design can achieve the same results using the same CPU with the same functional longevity.

No one builds electronics to be the best they can possibly be. You have a purpose and build the device to suit that purpose within a given operating range and at a specific price point. You want to maintain as much margin as possible while still offering products which are more attractive than your competition's offerings are. Internally, some of these companies have engineers fighting to do certain things and the powers that be tell them things like: "You can't have a Creative ZXRi, you must use a Realtek ALC1220 because we get a good deal on those." Yes, those types of conversations take place. I've talked to some of the engineers who design these products and told them they should do this or that. Sometimes it happens. Most of the time it doesn't because costs come into play. Sometimes we (motherboard reviewers) suggest something to an engineer like telling them to get rid of the ancient POST code display. Now, 5 years later ASUS motherboards have a LiveDash LCD display. I can't take credit for that, as I think someone else actually brought it up at a press event, though I did agree and even elaborate on that thought.

In any case, you aren't ever going to see some motherboard with 16 super beefy phases without phase doublers. There is no reason for that to happen from a cost or technical perspective.

That and trying to determine the quality of the other components, how the memory lanes are laid out, ect... This is stuff that can be simply said on a spec sheet and usually is.

Again, this is proprietary information these companies have avoided sharing as much as possible.

It's just that the motherboard market is just getting away with effectively false advertising for years. Lying about how their boards are configured. I don't trust ANY of the vendors on their spec sheets. Thus, only ones I can trust are not brands, but what gets reviewed and looks good.

I've been reviewing motherboards for more than a decade. I've been in the hobby for over two. In the two decades plus I've been building PC's and gaming on them, etc. I've always seen deceptive marketing. It has been worse over the last 10-12 years though.

(by a competent reviewer that tears down the board to find out just what is hiding under those fancy sometimes-functional heatsyncs, but that's another rant entirely)

We end up not having a choice. Again, the motherboard manufacturers tell us next to nothing about how these boards are built outside of whatever their marketing team puts in a slide deck or product page.

That and the whole stagnation in market for the last oh... 5-7 years. And the fact that AM4 isn't helping them as AMD isn't in bed with forcing socket changes for no reason.

The stagnation is due to a number of reasons. Most all of which have nothing to do with the motherboard makers themselves. Its CPU and chipsets that have stayed largely stagnant. You can blame Intel for this, but you can also blame AMD for not lighting a fire under Intel's ass.

Speaking on AM4, make a bloody high end or at least competent boards in the mATX form factor. There are no X470 mATX boards, and of the B450 ones, only a handful by MSI of all people are worth even considering IMO, given the shit components the rest of the vendors are using (including Gigabyte), and/or lying again on their spec sheets.

B450 is close enough to X470 that I don't think this is a huge deal. I believe these companies still sell far more ATX motherboards than mATX motherboards. This is why they still focus on that form factor above all else. mITX doesn't even sell in quantities that justify R&D for the product in some cycles. This was straight from ASUS, who was outselling everyone back in the day with their higher end mITX motherboards.

The motherboard makers are going to be in a for a shock over the next few years if they don't shape up, start being honest about the specs of their boards, and start making boards with quality components / features that are worth an upgrade. That includes fixing their software.

I'm going to have to disagree with a lot of this. These companies have no need to be honest about the specifications of their motherboards and every reason not to be. These companies do often use quality components. All of them cut corners somewhere, with everyone picking and choosing where to cut costs. With ASRock its PCB's. With ASUS' it was their VRM's on many models. However, they aren't the first to do this by a long shot. They've simply done so on higher end motherboards than we've seen previously. As for features that are worth an upgrade, I don't think you are being realistic. Again, stagnation is largely the fault of Intel and AMD. Its the processor market that drives the motherboard market. Features that are worth the upgrade just add cost and complexity to motherboards. Motherboard makers even try their best to add features people say they want, but again it drives board costs up and people don't want that.

Frankly, no matter what they do no one is going to upgrade their motherboard unless the old one dies or they are doing so in conjunction with a newer CPU. As for their software, this has been addressed recently by some of the motherboard vendors. However, I don't think most people actually use this stuff on their machines. I know I rarely do and I have far more exposure to what this software can and cannot do than most of you do. You just don't need to screw with it on a daily basis. I never advocate making hardware decisions based on software anyway. With Intel's XTU and AMD's Ryzen Master, there isn't much reason to give a shit about MSI's Dragon Center software or GIGABYTE's EZ Tune. ASUS has done the most work in making its software useful, but again once everything is dialed in most people forget about it.
 
I think my last 3 builds have been gigabyte, no problems and they have been fantastic, but I tend to buy their higher end ones.
Same for me after having a bad experience with ASUS. Gigabyte's software really blows compared to ASUS, though. The App Center could be something great if they didn't use it as an ad platform. And the way their BIOS is organized looks like something a hoarder would do. The hardware itself has always been rock solid, though.
 
My 2080 is the first Gigabyte product I've ever owned. Seems to be good, so far. It's interesting just how different are our experiences. Asus is the only brand of mobo that's never failed me. Evga, AsRock, MSI... all have gone bad for me on different builds.
 
I'm fairly into this stuff and I've been guilty of looking for a motherboard manufacturer that has a simpler product stack. I can imagine that people less interested in this stuff just get baffled.

I end up baffled by the product lineup. These companies used to hold at least one major press event for reviewers per year where they would educate us on their products and we could ask them why a given product exists or what they were thinking when they designed something. Even if we didn't understand all the decisions, we would at least be told how things broke down and what product was intended for a given market. Sometimes, they'd even pull engineers out there from China and via a translator, or bad English, we'd get to ask questions or make comments to them directly. Sadly, due to budget constraints these events were reduced in number to the point where they almost don't happen anymore. They probably won't now, at least not for several years assuming a huge rebound in the market.
 
Same for me after having a bad experience with ASUS. Gigabyte's software really blows compared to ASUS, though. The App Center could be something great if they didn't use it as an ad platform. And the way their BIOS is organized looks like something a hoarder would do. The hardware itself has always been rock solid, though.

GIGABYTE has struggled the most when it comes to getting its UEFI implementation squared away into something usable. It has had a ton of various interfaces its had to abandon over the years to get to the point they are at now. App Center is a mess, but EZ Tune itself is fairly solid even though its rudimentary. Hardware wise, I like most of what the company has done recently.
 
There has not really been any innovation in motherboards for a long, long time. RGB? Seriously? Cellphone charging while the computer is off? (WHO CARES on either of these...?)

We have all these huge multi-core monster cpus coming out (16 thread non-hedt on both AMD & Intel) and there have been ongoing performance problems with windows (desktop). Make me an AM4/C246 board that has ECC unbuffered support & has official Linux support (eg: When I complain a linux feature is broken, they actually investigate instead of telling me to install windows) & i'll pay 2x what the cost is for windows users.

eg: $120 AM4 X470 board, I'll pay $240 for real Linux, Official ECC Support, and 5 years of bios updates to fix all the cpu side-channel attacks there are.

Come take my money Motherboard makers....I'm waiting...
 
Sales down, lays off people responsible for pitching the product out and about to the masses..... Brilliant!

this.

they should fire the people who make them or design them.

marketing people ALWAYS know whats best.

bolded and capped for emphasis.
 
Who's buyin all these motherboards? I've bought 2 in 10 years. 12 million just from gigabyte?!

I struggle to grasp just how large the market is.
 
Who's buyin all these motherboards? I've bought 2 in 10 years. 12 million just from gigabyte?!

I struggle to grasp just how large the market is.

Its world wide with tons of sales occurring in China. There are even models specifically for those emerging markets and oddly, we get some of them here and I doubt they sell very well. I struggle to understand some of the decision making at these companies.
 
Back
Top