More than 12 billion Euros Germans will presumably have spent on digital consumer electronics by the end of this year, as is predicted by the German Association for Information Management, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM) in the run-up to the international radio and television exhibition in Berlin. This would correspond to an increase by 5.4% on the previous year. BITKOM base their prediction on a recent study by the GfK company which does research on consumer habits.
Back in spring the forecast by BITKOM was just +2.4%. However, the Football World Cup and the Olympic Games gave more momentum to this line of industry than originally expected.
However, the other side of the coin is that the market for consumer electronics in analogue format will possibly shrink by more than 20% to 0.8 billion Euros. Thus, the entire market for consumer electronics will grow by just 3.3% to 13.2 billion Euros.
On flat screen television sets German consumers will presumably spend 4.9 billion Euros this year which is a plus by almost 16% as compared to 2007. The number of plasma devices sold this year is said to increase by 19% to 630.000 units. With regard to LCD devices market researchers expect the number of units sold to increase by 31% to 5.1 million pieces.
Currently about 90% of turnover in flat screens is already generated by HD-ready-devices. Consumers are increasingly chosing tv sets with very big screens and diagonals of more than one meter.
Flat screens currently account for 38% of total turnover in consumer electronics.This figure is set to increase even further. For 2009 market researchers expect turnover to increase by 1.5% to 5 billion Euros in this segment.
Not only are the manufacturers of tv sets benefiting from the increasing demand for high-definition devices (HD), but also producers of peripheral devices. Thus, the demand for digital set-top-boxes and satellite systems is growing as well. In this field turnover will probably increase by about 18 percent to 440 million Euros in 2008. Sales of blu-ray-players are expected to triple to 50 million Euros as well.
According to a study by TechConsult in the course of which 1000 households were interviewed in June, the popularity of HD devices is going to increase rapidly. More than 1.2 million consumers plan to purchase a HD receiver or an HD-set-top-box over the twelve months to come. More than half a million households already have such a device in order to receive broadcasting channels in high-resolution quality. About 320.000 households, according to the study, plan to buy an HD camcorder in the months to come and 610.000 an HD hard drive recorder. 870.000 households would like to buy a blu-ray-player.
Even right now German households are already well equipped with digital consumer electronics: in June 2008 86% of all German households owned at least one mobile phone (in 2007: 83%), 54% a digital camera (in 2007: 52%), 41% an MP3 player (in 2007: 37%) and 21% a flat screen tv (in 2007: 15%).
With regard to mobile phones 74% of all users send short messages (in 2007: 71%), 47% take photos (in 2007: 31%), 21% listen to music (in 2007: 14 %), 17% send fotos via MMS (in 2007: 12%) and 6.5% use their mobile phones to connect to the internet (in 2007: 3%).
The international radio and television exhibition which will take place in Berlin from August 29th to September 3rd will serve as a first barometer in order to see to what extent the above predictions are correct. Detailed information on this exhibition is available online. 