Preliminary data from Meko’s DisplayCast market research service show that the Desktop monitor market in Q3 was almost exactly the same as Q3 in 2013 at 8.45 million units. Q3 2013 came out at 8.46 million. Meko believes that this was a positive result considering the difficult economic and political conditions in much of the region.
“This is a significant point”, said Bob Raikes, principal analyst for the service. “A couple of years ago, a major brand manager asked me if the market wouldn’t just continue to sink by a significant percentage each year, as our forecasts were for the decline to slow right down. There were two key factors in our analysis. First, although consumers have moved away from using PCs for media consumption to use tablets, commercial users continue to need the productivity benefits of good, large, fixed displays. Secondly, a huge number of monitors were sold as CRTs were replaced (the peak in a Q3 period was 14.7 million in 2007), and many of those monitors are finally coming to the end of life and will need replacing”.
“While consumers won’t bother replacing all their monitors, they will be likely to keep at least one good monitor per household for applications beyond those that tablets are best for. On the other hand, commercial users will need to replace their inventory”, Raikes continued.
In terms of brands, Samsung remains on top, although it’s down from Q2 and from a year ago. HP, Dell and LG are all very close, but remain in the same order as last time and all slightly up on last quarter, as were most other brands, in line with the typical seasonal pattern.
