Trends in market - metro and upcountry, a comparison with futuristic predictions

Indian market is full of
predictions since the market is slightly on the rise, post the lull
last year. With the growing demand for LCD monitors, the revenue
figure of most of the companies are going upwards. Earlier, metro's
used to contribute significantly to the number, but now, with the
tier-2 cities growing, there is hardly any difference. Govindan
Ramanujam, MD, BenQ India said, “LCD monitor market has been
growing at 12-13 percent for the last two years, but it is largely
dependent upon the growth of PC market, which has been stagnant for
that period, due to economic conditions.”

Vinay Shetty, Country
Head-Component Business, ASUS India said, “We expect the sales
figure to increase manifold and this can certainly be comforted by
the decreasing fluctuation in the panel prices. The most common trend
that we observed in the channels (upcountry and metro) is that they
are rapidly shifting towards more energy-efficient models and also
prefer monitors with more innovative features.” Today, customers
are shifting rapidly to larger sized LCDs but the awareness of LED
technology is still not there. Talking about the monitor sales in
metro markets, Kaustav Ray, MD, RP Infosystems said, “The metro
markets have already witnessed growing PC sales over the past decade.
Most households already have PC penetration. The metros are
witnessing a rise in second PC purchases, which are majorly notebooks
and netbooks. Naturally, monitor sales are dwindling. The market has
remained flat to marginally increasing only from two fiscal years. A
large chunk of PC sales is being taken up by notebooks and even with
the overall market growth, the PC portion is largely stagnant.”

Ranjit Yadav, Director-
Mobile and IT, Samsung, elaborating on this said, “There have been
occasions where in Metros, the bundled PC monitor has taken a beating
and big tenders have been chopped down to 'bundled PC minus the
monitors' because of the quality factors (or lack of it) associated
with the monitors.” Sharing the upcountry plan Yadav said,
“Upcountry gives us more opportunity for selling monitors
percentage-wise, but numbers indicate that Metros contribution is the
maximum.” Till about 5 years back, there was a concept of 'Family
PC' in India wherein the house had just one 'Family PC' which was
shared by everyone in the house; be it for education, entertainment,
running office applications, browsing etc. However, in recent times,
due to technology and increase in disposable income of the
households, notebook has become a personalized device akin to mobile
phones. Ramanujam said, “The LCD monitor market has been growing on
YoY basis, however the demand for CRT monitor is shrinking for
technological reasons.”

With the advent of
netbook, the concept of 'One PC per person' has got tremendous boost.
This is one of the main reasons why there has been a steady rise in
the sale of notebooks/netbooks and decline in the sale of monitors.
3G and gaming-enabled laptops are also the factors responsible for
this. Remarking on the divide
between upcountry and metro, Ramanujam said, “The metro markets
have a favourable disposition towards branded PC's but also the
requirement of a high-end monitor or multimedia monitor with superior
connectivity options are required owing to the needs and usage
pattern of urban customer. The non-metro customer is upwardly mobile
and demand for a basic LCD monitor is more in that segment, which is
affordable and high on utility.”

Currently, the demand is
getting more skewed towards the first-time buyer and the highly
educated and demanding customer; hence the market segregation for
product type is happening on a continuous basis between these two
categories. Also, the stagnant sale of PC in Indian market owning to
financial market turmoil also had its impact, but it can be safely
said that the conditions are improving rapidly.