APAC Tech Views: Microsoft & Meta read across: profitable monetization key to support the supply chain stocks

Research evidence excerpt

APAC Tech Views: Microsoft & Meta read across: profitable monetization key to support the supply chain stocks

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prior year Win 10 EOL, high inventory and weaker PC market due to higher

memory costs.

Microsoft implications for the AI supply chain:

Strong cloud growth and compute constraints to support continued

investments. Read across is positive relative to escalating fears on rising capex

relative to cash flows and questions on ability to monetize the spending at

attractive margins. Microsoft delivered strong overall and cloud sales growth and

further acceleration in September, pitching ability to leverage any model to

support its business and cloud service. The company also noted continued supply

short of demand across its platform and the industry and positive and fast

ROI bringing on new capacity.

Key suppliers in the Microsoft supply chain. For Microsoft's rack assembly, we

see lead suppliers Hon Hai and Quanta with highest share while Hon Hai, Quanta,

Wiwynn and Invnetec are key suppliers for general servers. On the chip design

side, we view GUC providing design service for the relatively low volume Maia 200

while Marvell is in development for Maia 300. For the CPU, Microsoft sounded

more upbeat, benefiting GUC as it indicated it was expanding Cobalt to more data

centers, with CoWoS packaging supplied by Amkor.

Microsoft implications for the PCs outlook - headwinds reaffirmed from

rising memory and component costs. Microsoft saw pull-ins for its FQ326

Windows OEM revenue (-7% YoY vs. down high teens guide), although is guided

much weaker into Sep with sales expected to decline low 20% YoY for its

September quarter. After a better H126, notebook ODMs are also guiding a

6% QoQ decline in Q326 and we expect brands to report teens decline YoY in