AUSTIN, USA: DisplaySearch has indicated in its latest preliminary figures for its Quarterly Desktop Monitor Shipment and Forecast Report that Samsung was the worldwide market share leader for LCD desktop monitor shipments in Q3-07, knocking Dell from the top quarterly market share position for the first time since Q4-01.

Dell had enjoyed the top market share position for LCD monitor sales every quarter since Q1-02. It was also at the forefront of the CRT to LCD transition, offering aggressively priced products, leading edge technology and a diverse portfolio of products to its customers.

As one of the top desktop PC vendors in that period, Dell began aggressively helping the market move from a CRT-based standard to an LCD-based standard by offering LCD monitors as part of its typical PC plus Monitor bundle.

The re-emergence of a standalone monitor brand Samsung as the leader in LCD monitor shipments shows the market is again in a new upgrade cycle for displays alone.

"The catalyst for growth in the LCD monitor market in recent quarters has not been the overall growth in the desktop PC market," noted Chris Connery, vice president of Market Research for DisplaySearch. "Growth in the annual $42B desktop display industry has been fueled by a new display replacement cycle. End-users are upgrading their displays not from CRTs to LCDs as they might have begun doing in 2002, but from smaller LCDs to larger and wider LCDs."

Move up similar to early stages
Samsung's move to the top market share position is similar to the early stages of the LCD monitor industry. From 1999-2001, standalone monitor companies such as NEC, NEC-Mitsubishi, Hitachi and Samsung were LCD monitor market share leaders as end-markets looked to these display-centric companies for their initial upgrade needs from CRTs to LCDs, until price points were low enough that PC companies, such as Dell and HP, began to aggressively market PC plus LCD monitor bundles.

In the current market of display-only upgrades, consumers and smaller businesses have been fueling world-wide growth since these buyers are less concerned about institutional standards and legacy compatibility. Vendors with a standards-driven customer base -- larger corporations, educational institutions and government agencies -- have seen these commercial institutions slow their PC refresh cycles due to infrastructure concerns and the recent introduction of a new operating system.

Additionally, while in the past both consumer and commercial growth came from the more mature markets, it is now seen that the heavy IT infrastructure now present there, especially in the commercial sector, is beginning to restrain additional institutional buying.

Large corporations, for instance, are looking to tie new hardware updates to larger infrastructural changes such as a change in operating system. The introduction of economically produced wide LCD monitors into the work environment, which is populated with non-wide displays, for example, is yet another new variable with which they are not ready to contend until changing corporate standards from Windows XP to Windows Vista.

Beyond the growth seen in worldwide consumer purchases of new displays, emerging markets such as China, are seeing organic growth in both consumer and commercial sectors with many purchasing new PCs and displays for the first time, however. The combination of the replacement-cycle growth in mature markets and the organic growth in emerging regions helped the overall world-wide market for LCD monitors grow 28 percent YoY.