Chinese Flat Panel Market Growing

As desktop PCs are slowly falling out of favor with the techno-elite in developed markets like North America—we’re told the hip people prefer notebooks—market research company DisplaySearch says other worldwide markets are likely to more than pick up the slack in desktop LCD monitor sales. According to the firm’s Quarterly Desktop Monitor Shipment and Forecast, China is poised to become the second largest worldwide market for flat panel monitors by the year 2011, with North America dropping to third place.

The top market for flat panel displays is currently the EMEA region (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). DisplaySearch estimates EMEA accounts for 35.2 percent of the worldwide flat panel market now, but that will decline to 31.5 percent by 2011—still enough to keep it in the lead. North America will decline from 22.6 percent of the world market to 19.2 percent by 2011, and China will surge from 18.4 percent today to 21.1 percent by 2011.

DisplaySearch also forecasts North America will be the only market region to actually see a decline in flat panel monitor shipments by 2011, going from a 2 percent increase this year to a 1 percent decline in 2011. For some reason, DisplaySearch is forecasting a 7 percent increase in flat panel sales in North America in 2009; perhaps they’re thinking of the forthcoming digital TV transition, or maybe they know something about the expiration dates on old-school CRT monitors we don’t. “The causal relationship between the LCD flat panel desktop monitor market and other applications that use large-area displays like notebook PCs and TVs may not be immediately apparent,” says Chris Connery, DisplaySearch’s VP of PC and Large Format Commercial Displays, in a statement. “but all are indeed interrelated.”