Record video card shipments for MSI and Gigabyte thanks to Ethereum boom

The boom of cryptocurrencies like Ethereum resulted in record shipments for video card vendors. DigiTimes writes Chinese-language media reports Gigayte and MSI achived historical highs in June. Gigabyte shipped 450,000 video cards last month and MSI saw its sales skyrocket to 500,000 units.

Gigabyte sold 900,000 video cards in Q1 2017 and saw its sales volume soar to 1 million units in Q2 2017.

After the recent cryptocurrency crash, some small miners have reportedly quit but major miners are expected to stay in the market. Gigabyte thinks its GPU shipments will decline about 10 percent sequentially in Q3 2017 due to lower demand from miners.

As for July, some market watchers expect MSI's graphics card and motherboard shipments to drop from June, but will return to growth in August and September. Its notebook shipments in the third quarter are expected to grow 25-30% sequentially because of seasonality.

Meanwhile, Gigabyte is taking a conservative attitude about the third quarter and expects its motherboard shipments to grow only 5-10% sequentially lacking new products to stimulate demand. Gigabyte also expects its graphics card shipments to decrease by over 10% sequentially in the third quarter as the mining trend will start to cool off and impact demand.

Here's a look at the recent Ethereum market action: