New figures from the German Consumer Electronics trade association GFU, compiled by Concentra Marketing Research, suggest that Europe has the lead in global Smart TV penetration, but with wide variations between individual states.
According to Concentra France leads with a Smart TV in 42% of homes. Turkey is next at 40%, followed by Poland with 36%, Germany with 34%, Italy with 28%, Spain and the Netherlands with 26%, and the UK at a paltry 21%.
But the big issue, as always is that not everyone knows they have bought a Smart TV and bother to connect it to the internet. So in the UK, 89% of Smart TVs purchased ARE connected compared to just 79% in France, 76% in the Netherlands, and 58% in Germany. Other European countries mentioned are all in the mid to high 60s.
To give us a comparison with the US, we have taken figures from a slightly older report carried out by TDG in May, entitled ‘gIn’]Home CE and Home Network Ecosystem ‘] 2013,’h which shows that the US has a Smart TV penetration of 25%, with 69% of them connected to the internet.
Combining the US and Europe figures on how many Smart TVs are connected to the internet shows that roughly a third of people with Smart TVs don’ft attached them to the internet.
These numbers aren’ft abysmal when taken in context with how they have grown. German figures from Bitkom in May 2012 suggested 16% Smart TV penetration in the country, which has now doubled. The US has seen a similar increase, up from 12% penetration. But the Concentra survey found that roughly a third of the 8,000 people surveyed across Europe didn’ft even regard the ability to connect the Smart TV to the internet as an important factor when they bought the device.
Samsung, the market leader in TV manufacturing, consistently cited by DisplaySearch as having 27.9% of the market, showed what it described as a seasonal weakness in its Q1 figures, but which DisplaySearch puts as a fall of 8% in shipments, and probably a lot more in revenue. Smart TVs were 35% of what was just under 49.5 million of total sets shipped in the quarter, so around 17.4 million of these were Smart TVs and around 4.8 million of those came from Samsung.
The worrying thing is that so far a fall of 8% for the quarter is comparing a weak quarter with another weak quarter, and although twice as many of these are Smart TVs, the actual numbers of devices are falling. If demand does not recover in line with previous seasonality, but carries on falling, the drop next quarter could be a lot worse and whether or not they are shipping Smart TVs or not will cease to matter. If Smart TVs are not sufficiently engaging consumers the TV makers will need something else to stimulate sales. The answer, from recent launches is that they will focus on HEVC and Ultra HD as the next differentiator in TV sets. If that works the 50% drop in Sony TV sales experienced in Q1 will have to be reversed, because it came to market with a UHD revamp of its devices first and Samsung only caught up with a new range out last week.