Morgan Stanley (MS) has released its latest report on "Greater China Technology Hardware," indicating a pessimistic outlook for the global PC market amid rising policy uncertainties and the risk of economic downturn. As a result, MS has lowered its forecasts for PC shipments from 2025 to 2026 by approximately 3%, while also cutting the target prices for six major suppliers from Taiwan, including Inventec (2324), Acer (2353), ASUS (2357), Hon Hai (2354), Gigabyte (2376), and Jentech (3533).

In response, many netizens expressed their concerns about the future of Taiwanese manufacturers, with comments like, "What do Taiwanese manufacturers have left?" and "Morgan Stanley, please stop talking..."

In the price adjustment, Gigabyte’s target is reduced from 350 TWD to 255 TWD, Jentech from 1860 TWD to 1400 TWD, ASUS from 705 TWD to 600 TWD, Inventec from 38 TWD down to 24 TWD, Acer from 40 TWD to 26 TWD, and Hon Hai is significantly decreased from 115 TWD to 47.5 TWD. Regarding ratings, MS has downgraded ASUS from "Outperform" to "Neutral," while Inventec, Acer, and Hon Hai are rated as "Underperform," and Gigabyte and Jentech maintain an "Outperform" view.

MS further analyzes that due to the potential re-imposition of tariffs in the U.S., some OEMs have pre-stocked inventory in the first quarter, pushing ODM notebook shipments above expectations. MS noted that the production of ODM notebooks in the first quarter exceeded the original forecast by 5%, and unlike the average seasonal decline of 16% in previous first quarters, this year saw only a slight decline, suggesting OEMs were pre-stocking ahead of the April 2 tariff take effect. However, with the notebook tariffs postponed for 90 days, momentum for stocking in Q2 is expected to strengthen further, especially among OEMs and ODMs like Dell, Wistron, and Inventec who had insufficient pre-stocking in Q1.

Against this backdrop, MS forecasts that Wistron’s notebook shipments in Q2 will increase by 6% compared to the previous quarter, and Inventec will grow by 10%, outperforming the market's projected growth of 5%. Therefore, despite exceeding expectations in Q1, MS still slightly raises its Q2 NB production forecast, estimating total shipments in Q2 to reach 31.2 million units, a 5% increase quarter-over-quarter but a 4% decrease year-on-year. However, due to the elevated base, overall performance still lags behind the level of previous years.