Despite the gloomy economic conditions in Europe, consumers still want the latest flat TVs. The latest data from Meko’s DisplayCast ATV market intelligence service has revealed that the EMEA ATV market for Q3 2009 was up by 16% QoQ and 12% YoY to just above 16 million units. Both LCD and PDP sales were up quarterly and yearly. LCD was up by 20% QoQ in volume terms to just above 13 million LCDs.
“Even though the economic conditions have been poor, European consumers still want the latest flat panel TVs”, said Goksen Sertler, TV market analyst at Meko, the European market research consultancy for the electronic display industry. “However, growth in the TV market is not spread evenly among the top tier brands”, she continued.
Samsung, Philips and Toshiba increased their market shares, reporting 22%, 41% and 63% QoQ increases respectively. The top five brands in the EMEA market in terms of volume shipments were Samsung, LG, Philips, Panasonic and Sony, in that order. The major change to the top five was a boost for Philips, which took Sony’s third position, as it saw a 41% QoQ increase while Sony’s quarterly shipments declined. Panasonic managed to keep its market share above 5% as its LCD shipments were up by 25% QoQ to 456K units.
“The Eastern European and MEA regions showed a 20% QoQ increase which was higher than in the Western European region”, Sertler continued. “Eastern European TV shipments have been in a decline since the start of 2009 because of low TV shipments to Russia, so this is a welcome change. Even though there was a recovery in TV sales to 3.3 million units in the East of Europe, we are not expecting a fast recovery in the region. The TV market in the East is still 22% below Q3 2008 shipment numbers and the consumer confidence index in those countries, including Poland and Romania, is not improving”.
In Western Europe, LCD shipments accounted for 92% of all TV shipments in Q3 and totalled 9.6 million units. The names in the top ten brand list haven’t changed since last quarter, but Sony and Panasonic swapped places and Sony is now in fourth position. In terms of screen sizes, 32″ is still the most popular size category as it accounts for 36% of LCD shipments in the West in volume terms and 34.8% in value terms.
“We have seen a fast move to 32″ 1080p LCD TVs in the West from Q1 to Q2. Because of this, many top tier TV brands were expecting 32″ 1080p to replace the shipments of 720p during Q3. However, that has not happened”, commented Sertler.
“We are putting together our next forecast by screen size, resolution and country. When preparing our forecast, we check various parameters, including the product ranges of the brands, consumer demand, panel supply issues and panel availability. Our last forecast was conservative regarding the move to 32″ 1080p sets. We are happy to see that we were right”, added Sertler. “The penetration of 32″ 1080p TVs in the Western European LCD market was up from 11.6% to 14.8% from the second quarter to the third quarter, whereas it doubled from Q1 to Q2. Samsung, Philips and Toshiba showed the most growth in larger set sales (above 26″)”.
EMEA TV market value was up by 16% to $11.5 billion on a quarterly basis. Value growth was driven by higher numbers of larger sized sets and greater popularity for 1080p ‘Full HD’ sets. However, market value was down by 9% in US dollars compared to last year.
