14 DAY TRIAL // The first quarter of 2010 saw a fairly strong demand on all fields of the IT industry, and market analysts hypothesized that the overall LCD monitor market would rise by 4-5 percent on year. This would have driven total shipments to 170-180 million. The reason for these assumptions was that sales were supposed to grow in the wake of the Windows 7 launch and rising popularity of LED backlighting, touchscreens and 3D functionality. Unfortunately, these hopes appear to have been dashed.
According to a recent report made by Digitimes, shipments in 2010 will stay flat on-year. This means that 'only' about 160 million units will be sold. The main reason is unexpectedly weak demand in Europe, China and, as surprising as it may seem, North America. This decrease in demand was quite pronounced during the recently elapsed second quarter and will likely persist until the end of the current one.
In China, there is no obvious seasonal pattern in the monitor market and vendors are quite conservative about market demand in the second half of the year. They even lowered shipment goals by 5-10 percent for the entire year, even though the Lunar New Year was quite favorable in terms of shipments. The situation is even more complicated in Europe, where vendors are mostly betting their performance on the year-end holiday shopping season. They also hope to somehow make up for the depreciation of the Euro by applying 7-8% price increases.
As for North America, demand will likely be uncharacteristically weak during the ongoing third quarter. On the other hand, some vendors expect the back to school September period to bring a significant amount of sales. All in all, even though enterprise and procurement segments will supposedly grow by 10% in 2010, the overall performance of LCDs won't be especially noteworthy.