The Desktop Monitor market in Europe saw further falls in the first quarter of this year according to the results of Meko’s DisplayCast report for Q1 2012.
Volume sales for the region as a whole were down 11.1% on an annual basis, and down 10.9% on a quarterly basis to 10.25 million.
“We had hoped to see some recovery after a particularly poor Q4”, said Meko’s principal, Bob Raikes, “but, sadly, there was little bounce back in most regions”.
The UK alone saw some encouraging growth but all of the other regions were down quarterly and annually apart from Middle East and Africa. This developing region was up on a quarterly basis, but down annually.
“Apple, with iPads and iPhones, and Samsung with its smartphones are ‘sucking the oxygen’ out of the consumer electronics market at the moment”, Raikes said. “Consumers are spending their money on these new devices and despite interesting innovations in smartphone connectivity to monitors with MHL from some vendors, there is little or no ‘attach rate’ of desktop monitors to tablets and smartphones. In the past, monitor makers did well with sales of monitors for netbooks, which often had inadequate displays, but the usage model of tablets doesn’t help monitor suppliers”.
Businesses, fortunately continue to buy and Meko is optimistic for the commercial business over the next two years as corporates start to gear up for the end of support of Windows XP. “We don’t expect to see much early excitement for Windows 8 among corporates, although some of the improvements in multi-display support are welcome. However, there is still lots of room for upgrades from XP to Windows 7. That will also bring some delayed refresh of monitors”.
“There are still some growth segments when you dig into the data, and monitor brands need to continue to innovate, especially to exploit connections to smartphones and other devices. The industry also needs to respond to the challenges in terms of image quality that Apple has laid down”, Raikes concluded.
