14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the fourth quarter of 2010 is proving to be less than favorable for quite a few segments of the IT market, and the display industry is one of the more or less visibly hit areas.
Reports about waning prices of large-panel LCDs have emerged before, though consumers will no doubt delight in lower prices during the holidays.
Still, when looking at them together with monitor and notebooks panels, it is revealed that the general situation is, one might say, somewhat lackluster, not just as far as consumers go but also from the point of view of suppliers.
To be more specific, it appears that, while the downward trend for 32-inch and larger LCD TVs is still in effect, the same cannot be said about notebook panels and monitors.
Apparently, the prices for such screens has remained flat compared to what they were prior to the first week of December.
One of the reasons is that year-end holiday promotions for notebooks will soon expire, which, in turn, means that end-market demand will be slowing down,
There is also how vendors are preparing for the first quarter of 2011 and the Lunar New Year.
This lack of price modification is what happened on the PC monitor front as well, where widescreens of 18 or 19 inches in diagonal are the only ones that saw any sort of tight supply.
Mainstream monitor prices remained balanced but some LCD monitor OEMs are starting to be more weary when making production plans.
The North American market did manage to return sales that were higher than expected, but demand in China waned during that same period.
As such, it is unclear how prices of LCD monitors will behave in December and panel prices will depend on the OEMs themselves, who may or may not decide to be aggressive in their buying plans.