Analyst: 4KTVs to reach 23% market penetration in 2016


Details

Editor

| 26 November 2015




Leading Chinese screen analyst TrendForce is predicting a boom year for 4KTVs in 2016 as their prices become more consumer-friendly.



The company calculates that overall global LCD TV shipments for 2015 will total 216 million sets, a slight annual decline for the first time since the shipment slide in 2013. Moreover it forecasts that in the short term at least consumer spending will generally remain weak due to the sluggish pace of the global economic recovery and currency fluctuations.

Yet it looks a whole lot brighter for 2016 which TrendForce says will deliver pleasant surprises with global LCD TV totalling around 220 million sets, up 1.85% year-on-year.

Looking at individual display providers, the data shows that South Korea-based Samsung and LG Electronics (LGE) will likely maintain their respective No 1 and 2 spots in the worldwide market share ranking in 2015, with their dominance expected to continue through 2016. In China’s LCD TV market this year, the market shares of major domestic brands have been lost to rising domestic Internet brands such as LeTV and Xiaomi, which benefited from the country’s booming e-commerce sector. Sony is currently the only Japanese brand that is listed in the top ten TV vendors worldwide. Other Japanese brands such as Sharp have seen on-going deterioration in their positions and will likely be lost in the competition next year.

The research also threw up some important stand out trends such as screen size becoming larger and high resolution being prevalent. The analyst notes that TV sets with screens sized 50” and above now account for 19.7% of the total shipments, up from 18.3% a year ago, and projects this figure to reach around 22% in 2016, with the 65” being vendors’ major focus. Also, the representation of high-resolution TVs will increase in the entry-level, 60Hz segment. As 4KTVs become more economical for consumers, their market penetration is expected rise to about 23%, compared with this year’s projected rate of 13-14%.

Other key trends include the battle between OLED and curved screens in the high-end market, with the former technology being pushed forward by LGE and latter pioneered by Samsung.

According to TrendForce, around four million curved-screen LCD TVs will be shipped globally in 2015. Key drivers will likely have been aggressive promotion by Samsung and several Chinese vendors. Next year, says the analyst, the annual shipments of curved-screen LCD TVs worldwide may hit eight million and the market penetration is estimated at 3.6%, compared with this year’s projected rate of 1.9%. By contrast, LGE is projected to ship 450,000 to 500,000 OLED TVs this year, with the market penetration at about 0.2%. However, LGE will likely ship one million next year with the market penetration almost at 0.5% on account of LG Display (LGD) expanding its OLED panel capacity.