Taiwan notebook ODMs see low order visibility for the first half of 2019, as the market is expected to continue to suffer from Intel's CPU shortages and uncertainties from the US-China trade war, according to industry sources.

Most ODMs have entered slack shipment season since the beginning of November and may experience even worse double-digit sequential shipment decreases for the first quarter 2019 than those recorded a year earlier, due mainly to CPU supply shortfalls, the sources said.

Buying sentiment among China consumers during the Lunar New Year holidays will hardly be as strong as before, given the country's weaker-than-expected economic performances, the sources added.

The sources continued that only gaming notebooks will be immune to the adverse factors affecting shipments of other notebook segments. As Nvidia is slated to release GTX 20 series mobile graphic cards at CES 2019 for official sales by the end of January, a fresh wave of replacement demand for new gaming models will be triggered in the first half of the year.

Most Taiwan ODMs saw their revenues for November drop on month, and only Quanta Computer posted a sequential increase of 7.38%.

Quanta 's November revenues came to NT$110.82 billion (US$3.59 billion), representing an annual growth of 17.01%, and its notebook shipments for the month reached 3.2 million units, staying flat as compared to a month earlier. Industry sources attributed Quanta's sequential and annual revenue increases for November to strong shipments of new MacBook Air and Apple Watch models to the US tech giant.

Compal Electronics reported revenues of NT$95.45 billion for November, down 3.74% on month and up 1.65% on year. The company's November PC shipments came to 3.4 million units, slightly up from October's 3.3 million.

Wistron's November revenues experienced a much larger sequential decline of 15.95% to NT$77.01 billion, down 13.58% on year. As the company released November revenues for such product lines as notebooks, servers, LCD TVs, desktops and monitors at almost the same levels as recorded in October, industry sources indicated that Wistron's revenue decreases in November were mainly associated with lower-than-expected iPhone shipment orders.

Inventec raked in revenues of NT$40.86 billion in November, down 11.57% on month and 9.28% on year, and its notebook shipments for the month declined slightly from October to 1.6 million units. The company estimated its revenues for the fourth quarter of 2018 to fall 5% sequentially.