CE Primed For Happy Holidays
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 10/23/2006
Believe it or not but the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) released its 13th Annual Holiday Survey. The annual report has quickly become an industry institution for one important reason over the years: it's usually accurate.
If its track record holds true this year the industry across the board will be happy by Dec. 25 since the survey predicts CE product planned spending will be up 15 percent for the holidays.
What is interesting that in terms of CE gift giving, at least this year, you can forget about a generation gap. Among the CE products adults and teens want for holiday gifts are portable MP3 players, digital cameras and computers, with cellphones and even portable CD players being high on the list.
As a New Yorker who walks around the city a lot and rides the subway every day I'm not surprised about the holiday demand for these products, especially MP3 players and cellphones.
At the end of a recent workday I took my usual walk from East 26th Street and Park Avenue South to 1st Avenue and East 14th Street to get the subway back home to Brooklyn. Of course on any given workday the streets of Manhattan are packed, but I began to count how many people during my walk were having disjointed conversations or seemed to be speaking to themselves ... namely they were using their cellphones.
By the time I reached the L line at 14th and 1st I realized that just on the side of the street I was walking on at least 10 or 15 percent were on the phone.
Coming to work the next morning starting at my home station in Brooklyn I began to notice how many people were in the familiar trance of “I'm not really here. I'm listening to my iPod.” It had to be more than people using cellphones the previous day, at least 20 percent, if not 25.
Based on this, maybe philosopher Y. Berra is right: “You can observe a lot by watching.” Based on my observations CEA's numbers are probably right on the money for those two categories.
Another one of the more interesting results of CEA's holiday survey concerned TV. In “likeliness to buy” the study showed that the two leading categories of TVs were LCD flat-panel with 15 percent and small-screen TV (under 40-inches).
Aside from the quaint memory of 10 or 15 years ago that analog tube TVs between 32- and 35-inches were considered “big screen,” another observation came to mind. So-called “small screen TV” is where LCD is supposed to have its strength, so the 15 percent number there has to be good news for those suppliers. But the other 15 percent number, about naming LCD flat panel as a format of choice, it is 2 percent better than plasma TV in this study with 13 percent.
To give the plasma TV backers their say, sure a survey like this could be off 2, 3 or even 4 percent one way or the other. One thing is as clear as the HDTV images on a new plasma or LCD flat panel: the battle for HD display market share between these two formats will be fierce. Price cuts will follow and the consumer, as usual, will benefit.
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