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Plasma TVs Face Near-Complete Demise

TMCnet Feature

October 29, 2014

Plasma TVs Face Near-Complete Demise

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By Tara Seals
TMCnet Contributor

Once heralded as a significant state-of-the-art breakthrough for display technology, plasma-screen TV is facing a huge blow with the news that LG is wrapping up that business. As a result, it looks as though LCD has clenched the title as top tech for TV.


Plasma screens offer deep color saturation and eye-popping quality for HD feeds in large-screen formats, and enjoyed a period of high-end demand. But they’re expensive to produce, so prices are somewhat hamstrung even as newer TV technologies are coming down in price.

The South Korean giant said that it will exit the plasma television business by end-November, and noted in a regulatory filing that plasma screens accounted for just 2.4 percent of its 2013 annual revenue.

"We wanted to keep it going as long as we could," LG spokesman Ken Hong told Reuters (News - Alert). "No matter how much we try to keep it going it's just not a business anymore."

Other TV bigwigs like Panasonic, Sony, Hitachi (News - Alert) and Pioneer have also pulled the plug on plasma. And Korean rival and compatriot Samsung already announced back in July that the display side of its business (which sells to multiple TV manufacturers) would halt production of plasma screens on Nov. 30, choosing to focus instead on curved and UltraHD TVs. Samsung (News - Alert) TV, now that LG is leaving the space, will be the last one to sell plasma models as part of its lineup.

The market demand just isn’t there for plasma anymore. One issue is the fact that they require a lot of power, which makes them bulkier and less modern-looking than the newer LCD models.

Analysts at IHS (News - Alert) Technology accordingly found a 16 percent decline to 2 million units for global plasma display panel televisions (PDP TV) in the first quarter of the year, noting that these are on their way out of the industry permanently.

In contrast, worldwide shipments of flat-panel televisions rose “convincingly” in the first quarter of 2014 compared with the same period last year, with LCD televisions seeing particularly robust growth, climbing 4 percent from January to March this year to 47.36 million units.

Total flat-panel TV shipments in the first quarter remained up by 3.3 percent to 49.36 million units.

"LCD TV shipments had expanded in the first quarter of 2013 because of a decline in the market during the same time in 2012, so in that sense growth last year was almost to be expected," said Jusy Hong, principal analyst for consumer devices at IHS. "But for the first quarter this year, shipments increased from an already respectable level during the same time in 2013, so what the industry has just experienced represents well-founded growth indeed at this time."

With the surprisingly robust expansion for the first quarter launching the industry on a solid start for the year, LCD TV shipments for 2014 could grow by 4 percent or even higher, Hong added.




Edited by Maurice Nagle


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