Meko Press Releases |
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LCDs Back In Fashion In European Monitor Market
DATE: 10th February 2005
The latest set of data from Meko's DisplayCast market research service shows that the European desktop monitor market showed very solid growth in Q4 2004 and that the penetration of LCD monitors in the market increased again. This is good news for the LCD makers following the slowdown in market penetration in Q3 2004. LCD panel price cuts implemented in late summer were in time for end user prices to fall sufficiently to boost demand and the relatively lower sales in Q3 were made up for by the growth in Q4. This suggests that the channel and end users are well aware of the trends in panel pricing and, if necessary, are prepared to delay purchases until the "price is right". The total number of units shipped was just under 13.3m units. The street price value of the market was more than $5.1 billion with the LCD monitor sector accounting for nearly $4.5 billion of that total. With panel prices and consequently monitor prices falling, LCD monitors rose from 64% to 70% of units sold. There were more than 26m LCD monitors sold in Europe in 2004 - nearly 3,000 every hour or nearly 50 a minute! Unit growth for LCD monitors was 58% compared to Q3 2004 and nearly 50% compared to the same period a year ago. For the CRT monitor, the decline continued with year on year shipments down by around 20%. However, some of the markets in the east and centre of Europe are still buying CRT monitors and the data shows quarter on quarter growth of 20%. The fastest growing sectors of the LCD market are for the larger screen sizes and the most significant increase came in the 22" and larger category. Here sales more than doubled from Q3 to Q4 as prices plunged and more vendors entered the segment. Samsung in particular has been driving down the price of its 24" models to meet the aggressive prices set by suppliers of 23" models such as Philips and HP. With Dell joining this sector in Q1, the market can only continue to expand. "We're pleased to see the larger LCDs becoming more affordable", commented Pete Gamby, research director at Meko. "With the choice of large size CRTs becoming ever smaller, users that need large, high resolution displays have been reluctant to switch whilst prices remained very high. Now that there is some good competition in this sector, we expect to see users begin to more readily replace 21" and 22" CRT monitors". However, Meko does expect most of the market for these larger sizes of display to switch to 20" or even 21" LCD in the short term. The overall market leader was Samsung with shipments in excess of 2m units. This is the first time any single supplier has shipped more than 2m units in a quarter. LG has moved up into second place in the European market and shipped nearly 1.5m units. HP also managed to reach a significant milestone with shipments of more than 1m LCD monitors in the quarter. --- ends --- 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 If you would like to receive press releases from Meko as soon as they are available, please send a blank email to: ListServer@meko.co.uk, with the subject line 'Subscribe MekoNews'. |