In a presentation at the Projection Summit 2012 conference preceding InfoComm, Dr. WilliamCoggshall, president of Pacific Media Associates (PMA), identified the principal causes for projector market stagnation and recommended strategies for combating this stagnation. The principal causes include:

1. Unlike most other industries, where prospective new entrants do their homework by looking at the size of the market and the number and strength of competitors before jumping in, a lot of companies apparently neglected this step, leading to too many big fish in too small of a pond. The natural response to this over-competition is to cut prices, so that many manufacturers are now making less-than-desired profits.
2. As in many high-tech product categories mostly manufactured in Asia, projector manufacturers have focused too heavily on market share as measured in UNITS. That was fine in the early days when annual growths were triple- and double-digit, but not today when growths are single-digit. Now they should be focusing on PROFITS, or at least REVENUES.
3. Compared with the potential offered by projector technology, the projector industry has not been very creative in exploiting it fully. (a) The range of size, portability and prices generally exceed those of flat panel displays (FPDs) but the projector market has lagged the FPD market substantially in units growth, though currently apparently not in profits. (b) Projector manufacturers — likeFPD manufacturers — have focused on too few “sweet spots” that are now commoditized, with resultant over-competition and price-cutting. (c) New projector models are so similar to old ones that there is little reason for users to replace their old ones. (d) Overall the industry has been doing things the same old way for too long, and has been so risk-averse it has missed opportunities.

To combat these problems, Coggshall suggested some strategies like the following for manufacturers:

• De-emphasize the commodity part(s) of their business.
• Focus on unsaturated markets, either by geography or by vertical market category. PMA is in the midst of helping companies find the most promising vertical markets via a just-launched “re-census” of the high-end projector range.
• Look for opportunities to sell complete solutions rather than naked projectors. A good example is the Storybeam cube in Korea that bundles Korean nursery rhymes with a tiny projector.