The sale of PC monitors in India has recorded 17 per cent sequential growth between July and September driven mainly by pre-festive buying, according to a recent study by CyberMedia Research.
Southern India accounted for 39 per cent of all PC monitor sales, followed by western, northern and eastern India, the survey pointed out.
But the market seems to be headed for a bumpy ride as global supply crunch of hard disk drives has dampened the off-take of assembled personal computers, which forms 85-90 per cent of consumer demand for standalone monitors.
The overall monitor sales in the top 30 cities stood at 7.41 lakh units driven by pre-festive buying and partly by the demand from the education space. These cities include Bangalore, Chennai, Kochi, Coimbatore, Chandigarh, Delhi NCR, Lucknow, Varanasi, Guwahati, Kolkata, Patna and Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Mumbai and Pune among others.
Note of caution
That said, its analysts have sounded a note of caution over how the global hard disk supply shortages could throw a poser for the assembled PC market, and hence also for monitor demand. The assembled PC market accounts for a large chunk of standalone monitor demand, and the rest comes from individual upgrading their computers.
“A sudden drop in supply volumes of internal hard disk drives caused a sharp increase in prices of this key component. This will continue to hamper assembled PC sales over the next few quarters, consequently affecting standalone PC monitor off-take,” said Mr Narinder Kumar, Analyst (Peripherals, Accessories and IT Channels), CyberMedia Research Infotech Practice.
Disruption
The floods in Thailand have disrupted the production of hard disks and IT components, leading to supply shortages in the laptop and desktop market in India. Thailand is a manufacturing hub for items such as hard disks and leading players, such as Western Digital, have their factories in that country.
Meanwhile, the survey noted that during the three months ended September, the unit sales of LCD monitors fell by 14 per cent compared to the previous three months (to 3.8 lakh units) whereas LED sales shot up 88 per cent (to 3.6 lakh units).
“The price difference between LED and LCD version of the same screen size has dropped to a bare minimum. Also LED technology itself is perceived as the latest technology, further fuelling its demand,” said Mr Sumanta Mukherjee, Lead Analyst (PCs, peripherals, accessories and IT channels) at CyberMedia Research Infotech Practice.