Shipments of consumer television sets to North America registered a 0.9 percent overall decline to 43.05 million units in 2015 and are expected to drop another 2.2 percent by the end of this year, according to the “First Quarter 2015 TV Sets Intelligence Service” from market research firm IHS.
The newly released numbers show most of the declines occurring in screen sizes of 39 inches and smaller as consumers continue to gravitate toward larger screen sizes, many of which offer 4K Ultra HD resolution.
Read more on 2015 TV sales and forecasts for 2016 after the jump:
By screen size, the segment seeing the biggest falloff was 30-39 inches, which registered an 8.7 percent unit shipment decline in 2015 to 12.6 million units, IHS said.
The lone big-screen exception to show a decrease came in the 50-inch and larger segment, which showed a 2.6 percent decline last year to 13.05 million units. The segment had been seeing year-over-year increases the prior two years, reaching 13.4 million units in 2014.
But last year’s 50-inch plus screen size decline appears to be an anomaly, as IHS said it is forecasting the 50-inch and larger category to see a huge boost in shipment volume (21 percent) by the end of this year.
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Among smaller screen sizes, only the 20-24-inch segment registered unit shipment growth in 2015 at 2.8 million units, following 2.7 million the year before. The category is expected to see a 33 percent decline in 2016 to 1.9 million units, IHS said.
Not surprisingly, the display technology achieving the most volume in 2015 was flat-panel LCD, which accounted for 42.9 million of 43.05 million overall TV shipments in the year. In the period, North American sales of OLED TVs, which were almost exclusively from LG, reached 73,000 units over the full 12 months.
IHS said it expects the volume of OLED unit shipments to climb 256 percent to 260,000 units by the end of this year.
By Greg Tarr
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