Futuresource Consulting has published its latest quarterly Worldwide (WW) Projector Market report, and one of the key findings is that the market’s value decline continues to rapidly outpace volume – leading to fears that certain vendors will struggle to maintain a presence in the mainstream market. In Q1 2016 the WW projector market declined 3 percent year on year (YoY) to 1.73m units, with value tumbling three times this pace at 9 percent, to $1.9 billion. There are, however, pockets of growth: China and India experienced resurgence during Q1 and global sales of laser phosphor projectors were up 128 percent ‘YoY’.

“The projector market faces multiple; mounting issues — namely competing display technologies (such as interactive flat panel (iFPD) and consumer/commercial grade flat panel displays (FPDs) which are significantly impacting the core mainstream market. WW sales of mainstream business to business (B2B) projectors fell by 7 percent at the end of Q1 2016. We can see that end users are upgrading but value has continued to tumble by 14 percent to $695 million,” commented Claire Kerrison, senior projector analyst, Futuresource Consulting.

The Futuresource report also found that the rate of decline in value is especially significant when one considers the sustained adoption of higher-grade product: “It is attributing to an ever-increasing proportion of mainstream sales, 4-4.9k lumen sales grew 1 percentage point in share YoY, to 8.6 percent whilst 1080p and WUXGA sales now attribute to 9.1% of sales, up 3 percentage points YoY,” continued Kerrison.

The report also highlights the growth of B2B short throw solutions, with sales increasing to 256k units, a rise of 8.5 percent YoY in CYQ1. However, growth has not been enjoyed by all regions — with only APAC seeing an increase of 25 percent ‘YoY,’, whilst EMEA and the Americas fell victim to macro-economic issues.

The APAC market was driven by strong latent demand in India, as well as continued demand for solid state illumination (SSI) in China (up 207 percent ‘YoY’). Futuresource intends to exploit its resources to dig deeper into the factors surrounding the extraordinary rapid rise of SSI in the Chinese education market throughout 2016. This will help determine to what level this success could be repeated in other major markets.