With LCD sets, size really does matter

With the soccer World Cup in Germany just three months away, sales of large-sized liquid crystal display panel televisions are picking up while smaller sets are increasingly losing ground. The rise in sales of televisions whose screens are 40 inches or larger is partly a result of massive price cuts introduced late last year. Prices are expected to keep on falling this year as domestic manufacturers jack up production. In addition, soccer fans eager to watch games on big screens are expected to give sales a further boost. As recently as last December, 32-inch LCD televisions accounted for 52 percent of Samsung Electronics Co.’s overall TV sales. By last month, this figure had dropped to 46 percent. On the other hand, the proportion of Samsung’s television sales taken up by sets of 40 inches or larger has increased from 38 percent last December to 47 percent last month. Suppliers are gearing up to meet this surging demand. Samsung Electronics’ seventh-generation LCD production line will boost the company’s production capacity by one-fifth to 600,000 panels from late this month; LG Philips LCD Co., another top manufacturer, will open its own seventh-generation plant in July that will roll out 360,000 42-inch panels per month. Meanwhile, Display Search, a market researcher, has forecast that come 2009, LCD sets will account for half of the big-screen flat panel TV market, compared with 6 percent last year. The agency also said that plasma display panel sets, currently 70 percent of the large-sized flat TV market, will see their share fall to barely 50 percent by 2009. by Seo Ji-eun