The price of 15-inch LCD monitor panels couldn’t keep dropping forever - not when some second-tier makers were selling them for less than the cost of production, and manufacturers were scrambling to convert production lines to 15.4-inch laptop panels, 17- and 19-inch monitor panels, wide panels of various sizes, and anything else that looked like it could be sold at a positive margin. Of course, the prices of some of these targets of opportunity started dropping pretty quickly.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer and
Mobile Display Report

So several reliable sources have been predicting that panels would start bottoming out, to be helped by the annual ramp-up for back-to-school computer sales. And now, for at least one vendor, the predictions are about to come true.

DigiTimes reported this morning that Shanghai-based SVA-NEC Liquid Crystal Display will raise prices of its 15-inch monitor panels by US$2-3 to US$95-96 in the second half of July, according to Henry Wang, CEO of WitsView Technology. DigiTimes translated the story from the Chinese-language Economic Daily News. This is the first time since the beginning of the year that monitor panel prices will increase, said Wang, who is also expecting prices for 17-inch panels to rise US$2-3 in July or August.

In the first half of July, according to WitsView, 15-inch notebook PC panels were selling at an industry-wide average of $98, $2 down from their average of two weeks earlier. And 17-inch monitor panels were at an ASP of $103, down $1 from the previous two-week period.

The bottoming out of bread-and-butter monitor panels may also help to stabilize TV panel prices, since there will be less motivation to use monitor lines for TV production, and it may eventually be attractive to use some newer, convertible TV/monitor lines for monitors.

Of course, there is still a huge amount of new, primarily TV-panel capacity scheduled to come on line over the next year or two. But it would be ungenerous to worry about that now.

For a change, LCD prices are actually going up. Let’s take a few seconds to enjoy it.