Five Focus for 2014 LCD TV Market

LCD TV has shown weak performance for quarters, even in emerging markets like China. Due to the sluggish global economic recovery and China’s ending subsidy policy, global LCD TV shipment declines 1.7% to 203.1 million units this year. However, 2014 will see good performance; even 3% growth rate is good news for manufacturers. What’s important is to have a knowing of direction.

There will five focus for 2014 LCD TV market, according to WitsView, division of Trendforce. These includes 1.Contineously growing TV sizes; 2.Penetration rates as high as 99-100% for LED LCD TVs and 65-70% for D-LED TVs; 3. Ultra high-resolution 4K2K TVs strongly promoted by brands; 4.Curve TVs vendors target at top-class consumers; 5. Given integration of smart-family system centered on smart TVs, 2014 smart LCD TV penetration rate to 36%.         
From last year, size increasing showed obvious signs, especially 50-and-above LCD TVs, whose penetration rate will rise to 15-17% in 2014 from 12% in 2013. By contrast, mainstream 32-and-under TVs are projected to drop from 48% to 42%. 4K2K LCD TVs hold a penetration rate rising from 1% this year (2.1-2.2 million units) to 8.1% in 2014(16-18 million units) on Chinese brands’ promotion.
Curve TV and smart TV is increasingly draw attention. Curve TV panel manufacturers will start mass production in Feb and March 2014. Because of the high pricing, the existing penetration rate is only 1-1.4%. As for smart TV, given high price and low awareness, the product is still at the integration stage of software and hardware between brands and telecom companies and sees fierce competition between platforms.
However, shipments will continue to grow to 36% in 2014(76 million units) from 28% in 2013(56.9 million units), says WitsView’s research director Burrell Liu. Next year, market occupancy will not show large change: South Korea-based Samsung and LG still lead market with shipments shares at 36%; followed by Chinese brands at 27-28%; Japanese brands at 18-19%.

Worth noting, since 4K2K and curve TV plays an important role in the next deployment of flexible OLED and QLED technologies, so the market will moving on.