Japan BCN: Development Trend of Digital Appliance Market in 2012

Recently, BCN, a well-known Japanese market research company, held a press conference featuring the theme of “Which is where digital home appliances will go in 2012—from the end of year-end business warfare expected to be a new trend in 2012”, with sales data of all home appliance sales stores and online stores in Japan as Based on the ranking of "BCN Rankings", the trends and trends of the digital home appliance market in 2012 were analyzed.

It is reported that at the meeting, we analyzed the huge trauma that left the home appliance market after the 2011 Japan earthquake and the flood in Thailand. The original plan was to start sending terrestrial television signals on July 24 last year. However, affected by the earthquake, signal conversion work in the three worst-affected counties in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima will be postponed until the end of March this year. The sales of LCD TVs, plasma TVs, and ultra-thin TVs with organic EL integrated in these three counties are not as good as last year. In November, compared with the same period of last year, only 27% of last year. However, in December, this data showed a rapid rebound, which was 236% of the same period in 2010. Driven by the popularity of television, the sales volume of tape recorders also surged to 225.5% over the same period of the previous year. There is no doubt that the ground signal conversion drives sales.

Not only AV equipment, but also digital cameras and home computers have experienced a surge in sales. The post-disaster recovery has also driven the popularity of these products. However, the proportion of the affected northeastern counties in the national electronics market is not optimistic, only about 2%. Executive Officer Junichiro said, "Although the disaster-stricken counties have strong market recovery power, they account for only a small portion of the national market and it is hard to say that it is an overall improvement."

One of the reasons why the IT and electronics market was hit at the end of the year was a major flood in Thailand. Thailand has a large number of factories that produce hard disk recorders, printers, and digital cameras. Floods have caused production to stagnate for a time. From the analysis point of view, the hardest hit DVR, from the 21st to the 28th of 2011, was reduced by about half compared with the same period of last year.

In terms of specific products, due to the special reasons for the conversion of terrestrial signals, sales of ultra-thin TVs and printers have exploded in volume from 2010 to 2011. At the end of the year in the context of business warfare, the number of sales in December increased by 3% compared to the same month of last year. However, the price of the product has fallen significantly. The actual sales amount was only 70.7% of last year. In the case of ultra-thin TV brands, Sharp's sales appear to be less, compared with Matsushita Electric's growth, which is dominated by smaller models.