14 DAY TRIAL // Sometimes, things sell better than anyone expected, to the point where there aren't enough products to go around, and sometimes the opposite happens. What we have on the display front is not an extreme example, but still one of supply-demand imbalance.
What is happening now on the LCD monitor front is not really along the lines of that opposite extreme, but it does come closer than some would like.
The world's top 10 LCD monitor vendors rather aggressively increased production during the last three months of 2013. This has led to oversupply, and demand is dropping even further now, which means that price cuts are coming.
That's a good thing for us, but a bad one for them. Alas.
The holidays were part of it, but slower than expected retail sales did most of the damage. Inventories have basically piled up too high, in spite of the fact that sales were actually better than in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Anyway, we can probably dare to hope that monitors will be a bit cheaper for a month or two. By up to 10% or thereabouts, maybe.
So why did monitors sell poorly in Q4 2013, one might ask. They didn't really, they just didn't sell as well as anyone expected.
In hindsight, perhaps they should have expected it, what with PC shipments having been on the downturn for over a year by that point.
But the fact is that LCD monitors don't really have much room to grow anymore. The full size spectrum is already covered, and Full HD resolution isn't about to be pushed aside by anything better any time soon. Especially with OLED tech so much more popular on UHD panels (which are mostly found in TVs anyway).
So, with today's monitors not really all that superior to those of one, two or three years ago, there aren't many people that need an upgrade, hence the slower market. We've seen some signs of companies favoring displays with 2650 x 1900/1600/1440 resolutions, but they haven't picked up much speed.