Samsung And Dell Enter Ring. Only Samsung Leaves
Dell has been tops in worldwide marketshare for LCD monitors since 2001. No more. As of the third quarter of 2007, Samsung Electronics has taken over the top spot. How did that happen? Well, Dell's business is largely based on selling you a monitor when you upgrade your computer. Not that many people are doing that. But everybody wants a mondo monitor.
The re-emergence of stand-alone monitor brand Samsung as the worldwide leader in LCD monitor shipments shows that the market is again in a new upgrade cycle for displays alone. "The catalyst for growth in the LCD monitor market in recent quarters has not been the overall growth in the desktop PC market," noted Chris Connery, vice president of Market Research for DisplaySearch. "Growth in the annual US$42 billion desktop display industry has been fueled by a new display replacement cycle. Users are upgrading their displays not from CRTs to LCDs as they might have begun doing in 2002, but from smaller LCDs to larger and wider LCDs."
Samsung's move to the top market share position is similar to the early stages of the LCD monitor industry. From 1999-2001, stand-alone monitor companies such as NEC, NEC-Mitsubishi, Hitachi and Samsung were LCD monitor market share leaders as end-markets looked to these display-centric companies for their initial upgrade needs from CRTs to LCDs until price points were low enough that PC companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP) began to aggressively market PC plus LCD monitor bundles.
Look, I can only type so fast, so a computer that can run Word four hundred times over is of dubious value. And as soon as I could get all the shaders on Doom3 turned on, I figured the old box was plenty fast enough. But HotHardware stands behind its longstanding advice: the best hardware upgrade is always a bigger screen. Samsung agrees! Dell... not so much.
The re-emergence of stand-alone monitor brand Samsung as the worldwide leader in LCD monitor shipments shows that the market is again in a new upgrade cycle for displays alone. "The catalyst for growth in the LCD monitor market in recent quarters has not been the overall growth in the desktop PC market," noted Chris Connery, vice president of Market Research for DisplaySearch. "Growth in the annual US$42 billion desktop display industry has been fueled by a new display replacement cycle. Users are upgrading their displays not from CRTs to LCDs as they might have begun doing in 2002, but from smaller LCDs to larger and wider LCDs."
Samsung's move to the top market share position is similar to the early stages of the LCD monitor industry. From 1999-2001, stand-alone monitor companies such as NEC, NEC-Mitsubishi, Hitachi and Samsung were LCD monitor market share leaders as end-markets looked to these display-centric companies for their initial upgrade needs from CRTs to LCDs until price points were low enough that PC companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP) began to aggressively market PC plus LCD monitor bundles.
Look, I can only type so fast, so a computer that can run Word four hundred times over is of dubious value. And as soon as I could get all the shaders on Doom3 turned on, I figured the old box was plenty fast enough. But HotHardware stands behind its longstanding advice: the best hardware upgrade is always a bigger screen. Samsung agrees! Dell... not so much.
