Video Posts Strong '00, Soft Jan.

By Greg Tarr -- TWICE, 2/12/2001

ARLINGTON, VA. -Although video sales finished 2000 on an upswing, January reports show the segment stutter stepping into the next millennium, according to sales-to-dealer numbers released by the Consumer Electronics Association.

According to CEA's official numbers for 2000, the overall video hardware business recorded increases in almost every product segment to reach 67.8 million units, a 12 percent increase over 1999. However, the pace was not maintained in January 2001 as declines from January 2000 were registered in analog direct-view TV, analog projection TV, VCR decks and camcorders.

Only TV/VCR combos, with a 2.4 percent uptick in factory unit sales, and DVD players, with a respectable though substantially slower 54 percent growth rate in unit sales, beat numbers from the year-ago period.

DVD was a big factor in the 2000 video sales performance. In December, stand-alone DVD player sales to dealers reached 1.3 million units, an increase of just less than 102 percent over the 1999 period. In January, the segment registered 572,031 player sales, a considerable slowdown from the 194.8 percent growth pace registered last January over the 1999 period, as the category establishes itself as a true mass-market product.

January's DVD player numbers indicated a healthy annualized selling rate of 15.1 million units.

As mentioned above, TV/VCR combos continued to be an early bright spot for 2001, with January unit sales to dealers reaching 219,601 pieces, after closing out 2000 with a 13.4 percent increase in December and a 12 percent increase for the year to nearly 5 million units. January 2001, meanwhile, shows an annualized selling rate of 4.45 million units.

Snags were the biggest in VCR decks, which dropped 32.6 percent in January factory unit sales to 760,220 pieces, indicating that the popularity of DVD video players is starting to take its toll. The category finished 2000 with a 1.2 percent growth rate to 23 million units, but so far, the indicated annualized factory selling rate for the year is only 14.7 million pieces.

Also reeling is the camcorder category, which showed a 29.2 percent decline on January unit sales of 210,088 pieces. This followed a stellar December with a 40.1 percent increase to 543,547 units, helping the full-year numbers rise 22.1 percent to 5.84 million pieces. The indicated annualized factory sales rate is a soft 4 million.

Analog projection television had a tough December and January, as factory sales dipped 12.3 and 22.3 percent, respectively. Obviously feeling the impact of the growth of digital TV models, the category moved just 69,328 units in January, following a full-year-2000 performance of 1.2 million (down 1.3 percent). The annualized selling rate for 2001 is 1 million units.

Analog direct-view TV factory sales (excluding TV/VCR combos) were down 2 percent to 1.33 million units in January, following a strong December that showed a 21.5 percent growth rate to 2.54 million units. Full-year-2000 numbers were up 4.1 percent for the segment to 24.1 million units, but the annualized selling rate for January is just 23.3 million.