According to JW Insights, JW Insights believes that Mini LED TVs have huge market potential. As the cost of Mini LED backlight modules continues to decrease, the Mini LED TV market will achieve explosive growth, surpassing OLED TVs and becoming Mainstream in the mid-to-high-end TV market.
Mini LED backlight helps to promote the upgrade of LCD TV products. Mini LED has higher integration, higher contrast, lower power consumption. As a backlight, it can improve the contrast, color reproduction, brightness, etc. of LCD TVs. It can even make LCD TVs comparable to OLED TVs in image quality and at a higher cost. Low, longer life, has become one of the important technologies for LCD TV upgrades.
Mainstream TV manufacturers have used Mini LED backlights to upgrade LCD TVs, making 2021 the first year of large-scale Mini LED commercialization. However, different TV manufacturers have different Mini LED TV strategies.
Samsung and TCL Electronics are the main force of Mini LED TVs. They originally promoted QLED TVs in the mid-to-high-end TV market. Now that they add Mini LED backlights, the brightness, contrast, and color gamut of QLED TVs have been improved to varying degrees, making QLED TVs have more picture quality chips to compete with OLED TVs. In 2021, Samsung and TCL Electronics (including Thunderbird) have launched ten Mini LED TVs, leading the Mini LED TV market in an all-round way. Among them, TCL Electronics has a layout for high-end Mini LED TV products and is currently in the leading position in the market.
LG, Skyworth, and Sony, the main players in the OLED TV camp, have different attitudes towards Mini LED TVs. LG and Skyworth are embracing Mini LED TVs to make up for the lack of OLED TV product layout. At present, the mainstream sizes of OLED TVs are 55 inches, 65 inches, and 77 inches. Skyworth and LG have simultaneously launched 75-inch and 86-inch Mini LED TVs to make up for the lack of OLED TV sizes and further improve the high-end TV product line. Sony is different. The Sony brand is positioned in the mid-to-high-end market. It is in a leading position in the original high-end LCD TV and OLED TV markets. It is not in a hurry to upgrade LCD TVs to Mini LED TVs.
Hisense and Changhong, the main forces in the laser TV camp, mainly promote laser TVs in the high-end TV market, and adopt a market strategy that focuses on participation in Mini LED TVs. Although Hisense has launched three Mini LED TVs, the focus of promotion is almost entirely on laser TVs, and the resources for Mini LED TVs are very limited. Changhong has released an 8K Mini LED TV, which is mainly used to establish a high-end brand image and has not been sold in the market.
Other manufacturers such as Huawei, Konka, Philips, LeTV, and Xiaomi are not keen on Mini LED TVs. Most of them have just launched a TV, and some are even used to show their muscles, which has a limited impact on the Mini LED TV market.
Driven by mainstream TV brands, the Mini LED TV concept is hot, but the market performance is not as good as expected. Aoweiyun.com report pointed out that the sales of Mini LED TVs in 2020 will reach 10,000 units, and the sales of Mini LED TVs in the first half of 2021 will be only 30,000 units. Aoweiyun.com has reduced the market size of Mini LED TVs from 250,000 units to around 150,000 units in 2021. GfK is even less optimistic about the Mini LED TV market, and even predicts that the retail volume of Mini LED TVs in China in 2021 will be only 70,000 units.
JW Insights believes that there are three main reasons for the limited sales of Mini LED TVs: First, the Mini LED TV market seems lively, but the real promoters are only Samsung and TCL Electronics, and other brands are still in the stage of participation. Second, the high initial cost of Mini LED backlight modules has greatly increased the cost of LCD TVs, making Mini LED TVs stay in the high-end TV market. Third, the LCD panel industry is in an upward cycle, with high prices, coupled with the increase in the price of driver chips, copper, etc., so that the price of LCD TVs has risen, and the increased cost of Mini LED backlight modules makes it slightly more competitive with OLED TVs. Significantly insufficient.
However, in the medium and long term, Mini LED TVs have huge market prospects and will become the standard configuration of LCD TVs. With the reduction in the cost of Mini LED backlight modules and the upgrading of technology, the price of Mini LED TVs is gradually approaching that of traditional LCD TVs. By then, Mini LED TV sales will surpass OLED TVs and become the mainstream of the mid-to-high-end TV market.
The Gartner report pointed out that compared with traditional LED backlights, Mini LEDs have higher contrast, brightness and color gamut, and are the first to be adopted by large-scale high-end TVs. In the future, Mini LEDs are expected to become the first backlight technology. By 2024, at least 20% of the All medium and large-size display devices will use Mini LED backlights. Omdia predicts that by 2025, Mini LED backlight TV shipments are expected to reach 25 million units, accounting for 10% of the entire TV market.
Post time: Oct-25-2021