Taiwan sits at the heart of the global technology industry. Almost every smartphone, laptop, server and AI chip in the world passes through factories on the island at some point, which makes the monthly sales figures from Taiwanese tech companies one of the best early-warning systems for where the wider tech sector is heading.
Wedbush Securities, a US investment bank, tracks 18 categories of Taiwanese tech hardware every month and compares actual sales against what analysts had forecast.
In September, 17 of those 18 categories were running at or above expectations, with the overall index finishing the third quarter around 12% ahead of where analysts had expected it to start.
Memory leads the charge
The eye-catcher was memory chips, the components that store data temporarily while a computer is running.
Memory sales came in 14% above expectations in September alone, and finished the quarter roughly 42% ahead of where forecasts stood at the start of July.
That is a remarkable number by any measure, even if it is a step down from the second quarter, when memory ran at nearly double expectations.
The reason for the relative slowdown is that analysts raised their forecasts sharply as the strength became apparent, so the bar was considerably higher by the time September arrived.
Servers power ahead
Servers, the powerful computers that run cloud services and AI applications, were the other major driver.
The components that go into servers, including specialist circuit boards and the companies that assemble the machines, finished the quarter between 10% and 29% ahead of expectations depending on the category.
One weak spot
Consumer PCs were the exception.
Laptops and desktops aimed at ordinary buyers finished in the bottom half of the index, and Wedbush flags them as the area most at risk in the final quarter of the year as rising memory costs get passed on through higher prices.
The overall picture, according to Wedbush, is one of robust tech hardware demand driven almost entirely by AI infrastructure spending rather than the consumer electronics market.
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