Samsung top LCD brand, followed by Dell and HP

Samsung Electronics was the worldwide market share leader for LCD monitor shipments in the third quarter of 2007, knocking Dell from the top quarterly market share position for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2001, according to the latest survey from DisplaySearch.

Dell had enjoyed the top market share position for LCD monitor sales every quarter since the first quarter of 2002, and was at the forefront of the CRT to LCD transition offering aggressively priced products, leading edge technology and a diverse portfolio of products to its customers.

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.