A few days after the world focuses on my hometown of New York tonight, I’ll be flying toward its Las Vegas simulacrum en route to the Consumer Electronics Show. My colleagues and I will be participating in a number of presentations and roundtable discussions at CES, including:
I’ll be moderating that last panel, which will bring together representatives from the worlds of broadcasting, wireless service providers, and mobile platforms. Most of the attention at CES is on giant screens, but the past year has seen an explosion in PC-based broadband TV and video on sites such as Hulu and those of the major broadcast networks. That’s a dramatic contrast from the walled gardens that have characterized the mobile TV offerings to date from providers such as MediaFLO USA and MobiTV, the latter of which recently passed the 5 million subscriber mark.
Read more »
Even though the holiday selling season isn’t over yet, it doesn’t feel unnatural to start setting expectations for 2009. As much as 2008 was a stress test for the electronics industry, 2009 is likely to raise our anxiety levels further and require even more constant monitoring than we needed last year to avoid heart failure.
Undoubtedly the first half of 2009 will be miserable, and not just because the first half of almost every year is miserable. NPD’s Consumer Spending Indicator does not provide much room for optimism. While we don’t offer forecasts, we can offer a bit of guidance/observations on some key signposts to watch for in the first half of the year that might provide some clue as to the level of anxiety to expect in the back half.
Read more »
NPD’s newly released weekly ecommerce data for the first few weeks of the holiday shows, as it has in our monthly tracking all year, a considerable divergence in trends between brick and mortar retailing and online sales. In the weekly data we saw strong results, as expected, for ecommerce during the Cyber Monday week, but in addition we saw very strong growth -stronger than in Cyber Monday week - for ecommerce during Black Friday week. Sales growth in general was much stronger online than in stores for both weeks.
So, is ecommerce the light at the end of the tunnel for consumer technology retailing or is it a freight train, ready to crush physical retailing like Wile E Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons? It is fascinating that in the 10 years or so since Internet retailing burst into our consciousness that we are still asking this question.
Read more »
Citing the success of its Web site and retail stores as opportunities to market its products, Apple announced yesterday that this would be its last Macworld Expo, one of the few technology trade shows open to the public. SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller will deliver the final Macworld Expo keynote. Given the company’s proclivity to own its customer experience, the move was not surprising. For years, Steve Jobs foreshadowed the waning days of his own keynotes by talking about how many more people were coming to its stores than attending Macworld Expo.
However, it’s not simply the raw floor traffic and greater scheduling and geographic availability of Apple stores that has likely led the company to abandon its once-biannual homecoming, it’s the quality of interactions it has there. Its Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York, for example, is programmed like a cable network — an unending series of seminars and support sessions that provide opportunities to educate consumers about Apple and third-party products sold at the stores. And at both its physical stores and its Web site, Apple has a more direct path to monetization that it has within the walls of Moscone Center (even with its Market Street store just a few blocks away).
Read more »
Black Friday results for imaging were less than we had expected, and really a disappointment in a sector which has, for so many years, been an exciting holiday electronics driver.
Not only were point-and-shoot camera unit volumes down, but DSLRs declined in units for the first time ever in our weekly data, although just by one percent, despite a lower average price of $618. NPD’s Consumer Technology Holiday Snapshot report revealed that a quarter of those who were intending to buy a DSLR this holiday season were going to put off their purchases. Digital picture frames, 5 inches and greater, were still up 10 percent in units, and were one of the few categories of unit growth over Black Friday, but down seven percent in dollars.
It’s clear that on top of the recession, saturation is playing a large part in the lackluster performance specifically for the point-and-shoot digital camera segment. Three quarters of U.S. households have at least one digital point-and-shoot camera. Retailers and manufacturers need to find ways to reignite a passion among those who may be waiting to trade up. They have to be more aggressive and creative in messaging to consumers, not just about buying cameras, but about all the connections consumers can make with their personal images.
Read more »
Apple creating a stripped-down $99 iPhone for Walmart would be more than just counter to the way that technology products, particularly cell phones, usually proceed in the market. It would be an unprecedented move for modern-day Apple, which has avoided retailer-exclusive SKUs except those in its own Apple Store (the Project Red iPod) and has historically striven for simplicity in its product line. Particularly with the iPhone, Apple has been so focused on preserving the level of user experience that it went weeks with low or no inventory of the original iPhone model leading up to the launch of the iPhone 3G.
There’s little doubt as to why Walmart would want to carry the 3G iPhone. NPD tracked the device as the best-selling handset in the U.S. in Q3, surpassing the Motorola RAZR in a dramatic consumer embrace of Web-savvy smartphones. Recent smartphones such as the T-Mobile G1 and Blackberry Storm already represent the second wave of would-be “iPhone killers” following advanced touchscreen feature phones that appeared earlier in the year.
Read more »
One of the biggest stress points of this holiday season in the PC business has been the status of the emerging class of small notebooks, dubbed “netbooks.” While netbooks have been around for about a year, until very recently, they were the province of the early adopter with a heavy ecommerce bent. According to NPD’s retail tracking service, 88% of all netbook sales were made in ecommerce between Q4 2007 and Q2 2008. Even in Q3, the largest notebook opportunity of the year, netbooks in ecommerce outsold those in traditional retail (2/3 to 1/3). But in October we finally got a taste of what the netbook market could really be as netbooks finally hit the volume opportunity of U.S. retail. In October, 60% of netbook sales were at retail, and unit volume nearly equaled the entire volume of Q3. To put the opportunity in real context, for those who think ecommerce sales are a significant netbook opportunity, the sales results for netbooks in Q4 2007 through Q2 2008 represented less than 1% of consumer notebook sales. Even in Q3, when sales began to appear in retail, netbooks were less than 2% of all notebook sales. Finally the October numbers show some real measurable volume with netbooks accounting for over 6% of consumer notebook sales and early November results show netbook sales at about 5% of total volume.
Read more »
Flat-panel TVs and PCs may be the workhorse revenue drivers during the holiday season, but the same big price tags that help them achieve that standing also make them somewhat less popular as gifts. In contrast, portable electronics such as MP3 players and digital cameras have consistently been among the most popular holiday categories for the past few years because of their relatively small price tag and dimensions. They’re cheap to ship directly from an online retailer or to a distant relative or friend. They’re also products that consumers can take great advantage of in their daily lives, which further helps their gift appeal.
In that vein, there’s been doubt cast about how well Portable Navigation Devices (PNDs) will do this holiday season. Despite several attempts to turn them into everyday resources in the vehicle, they are still primarily used opportunistically or what I call the LOFT (Lost or First-Trip) scenario. At the high- end, Dash Navigation, which made a bold attempt to move the industry past LOFT, recently got out of the hardware business. It has, however, been quickly succeeded by Telenav with its slimmer and less esoteric Shotgun.
Read more »
Consumer Technology, Wireless | Ross Rubin, Executive Director, Industry Analysis | 
December 31, 2008 3:32 pm | 
Comments (0) 
Subscribe
