Competition heating up in LCD gaming display market

It's becoming a common theme in a lot of our posts, the overall PC market isn't doing that great as sales have been declining for years but some sub-segments of the market like gaming PCs are doing rather well. Success attracts competition so it's no surprise to see a new report from DigiTimes talking about how rivalry in the LCD gaming market is heating up.

Overall sales of consumer LCD displays are dropping but demand for enterprise and gaming monitors is increasing. Not only is demand growing for gaming displays, the average selling price and the profit margins are higher than those of traditional displays. Gaming display vendors like ASUS, BenQ and Acer can expect to see fierce competition from newcomers like Samsung, LG, Dell, HP, Lenovo and AOC/Philips in 2017.

The mainstream size is 21.5-inch for the traditional monitor segment, while 23- to 24-inch is the second most popular size. For gaming monitors, 24-inch models priced between US$299-499 account for 70% of overall shipments, followed by 27-inch models priced between US$349-899 and 34- to 35-inch models. Products with displays larger than 35-inch may see demand growth, mainly contributed by North America and Europe.

Curved LCD monitors have not seen significant shipments in 2016, but their popularity is expected to grow among gamers and significant shipment growth is expected for 2017.

This year ASUS held a marketshare of 35 percent of gaming displays with a refresh rate of 144Hz, followed by BenQ at 22-24 perent and Acer at 17-19 percent.

Total sales of gaming displays are expected to hit 1.2 million units this year, more than double as much as the estimated 550,000 to 600,000 units that were sold in 2015. Next year another doubling is in the cards, analyst predict shipment volume may soar to 2.5 million units, and for 2018 they estimate sales of 3.5 million units.

Gaming displays are little more than a drop in the bucket at the moment, they make up just a small fraction of the 120 million displays sold this year. But even though they account for just 1 to 2 percent of overall volume, they account for about 3 percent of production value due to their higher prices.