Meko Press Releases

LCD TV Sales Continue To Grow In Europe

DATE: 30^th November 2004
The LCD TV market in Europe grew by more than 10% from Q2 to Q3 2004. With sales of larger screen sizes taking a larger share during the period, the amount of money that consumers spent on the latest flat TVs rose by more than 14% to $1.2 billion. They also spent more than $1 billion on plasma TVs. The share by TV type across the six main TV-buying countries shows that shipments of non-CRT sets in Germany and the UK are approaching a 20% share by volume. In all countries covered by Meko's DisplayCast ATV report for Q3 2004 (with the exception of the Rest Of Europe region), more than 10% of TV set sales were either flat panel or rear-projection sets. "There seemed to be some expectation that LCD TVs would rapidly replace the traditional CRT set in European homes", noted Pete Gamby, research director at Meko. "However, we've been cautious in our forecasts for this new technology as consumers seem wary of switching from what they know". Whilst prices for larger LCD TVs have continued to drop at a rapid rate this year, the majority of sets being bought are still less than 20" in size. This suggests that they are being used mainly as the second or third TV in the home and are not replacing the main living room set. "Prices for larger LCD TVs are still prohibitively high for the vast majority of buyers", added Gamby. "The premium set market is also seeing aggressive reductions in the price of plasma TVs and more and more features being added to top-of-the-range flat CRT TVs. This makes it even more difficult for LCD TVs to gain market share, even amongst buyers that are prepared to spend that bit more". As noted, there were worries that LCD TV shipments would not rise in line with some vendors' expectations in Q3 but the shipments for the period are slightly ahead of Meko's forecast of 794,000 units. The market leader by some considerable margin was Sharp with more than a quarter of the sets sold coming from the Japanese vendor. "We were also pleased to see that our forecast for plasma TV sets, which was just under 250,000 units, was very close to the actual result this time", said Gamby. Total TV shipments to the top four regions (France, Germany, Italy and the UK) were all in excess of 1m units with the UK being the largest single country market for Q3 2004. Overall, shipments were up by 4.9% compared to Q2 with the majority of the growth coming from the Rest Of Europe region where sales were up by more than 20%. This was partly due to strong sales there from the market leader for the quarter, Samsung. The company reported a strong rise in sales out this time and overtook both Sony and Philips overall. Philips led the market in value terms thanks to its product mix with Sony second ahead of Samsung. This highlights Samsung’s dependence on CRT shipments for its volume leadership. Meko expects the growth trend to continue in Q4 and has forecast sales of more than 900,000 units for LCD TVs during that period. Plasma TV sales will approach 300,000 units.

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Notes to Editors:

For more information about Meko and DisplayCast please contact Pete Gamby
E-mail: peteg@meko.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1276 22677

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