LCD And Flash Memory Thrive In First Half Of 2001

RESTON, VA.— While poor PC sales have grabbed the bulk of the news headlines during the first half, products such as PDAs, LCD monitors and blank CD media quietly rolled up very healthy gains, according to a study by NPD Intelect.

The six top performing products were removable memory, LCD PC monitors, blank CD media, PDAs, printer consumables and CD-R drives. Of these the top-two revenue earners for the first six months of the year were removable memory and LCD monitors, which grew at 210 percent and 149 percent, respectively, compared to the same period in 2000. The remainder all enjoyed increases of at least 30 percent.

"This gives evidence that people haven't stopped spending, but just changed what they buy," said NPD analyst Steve Baker.

Whether this level of buying will continue through the second half of the year cannot be fully determined, but Baker said he thought there is evidence consumers will focus their spending efforts outside the core computer products areas of PCs, CRT monitors, printers and scanners.

These all experienced a dramatic falloff, according to NPD. PC sales were down 20 percent with a corresponding 20 percent drop in the products share of the categories revenue. CRT monitors were down 23.3 percent.

The one variable is the impact the introduction of Windows XP will have on sales.

Since XP requires a full-featured PC with at least 128MB of RAM to function, PC vendors are banking on it as a reason for people to replace their older PCs.