TVs and monitors rise in price due to power outage at Japanese glass factory

Last week, there was a power outage at Japan's Nippon Electric Glass (NEG) glass factory for display production. Because of this, according to TrendForce analysts, displays will rise in price until the end of the first quarter of 2021. The biggest rise in price is possible on TV panels and PC monitors. In other words, large format displays.

According to analysts, Nippon Electric Glass is gradually restoring production. But the incident is still expected to reduce shipments of large glass substrates (substrates for panel production) by 2.5% in the first quarter of 2021. To this it should be added that in the past six months, due to the high demand for televisions during the pandemic, there has been a shortage of these very panels. Thus, one negative factor will multiply another, which will lead to higher prices for TVs and monitors, even during the usually sluggish trading period in the first three months of the year.

TrendForce experts emphasize that TV panel prices have recently sought to stabilize, but the incident at the glass smelting plant brought "the hidden risk of increasing panel shortages" back to the fore.

Thus, the previous forecast said that in December prices for large-format panels will rise in price by 2-3% over the month. According to the updated forecast, the rise in prices will already be 4-5%, and will continue to rise in January-March 2021.

For desktop monitors, the lack of NEG glass will primarily affect IPS monitor panels and entry-level TN monitor panels with a 19.5-inch screen. Therefore, in this category of products one should expect the greatest rise in price. Panels for laptops in December will rise in price to a lesser extent - by 3-4% per month, but if panel manufacturers decide at their expense to increase the production of more demanded and therefore expensive panels for TVs and desktop displays, then prices for panels for laptops may even rise by 1-2%.

To all of the above should be added the recent power outage at Micron's Taiwan RAM chip factory and an earthquake near Taiwan, which either affected the production of memory and SoC, or did not. The news about the "incidents" went so tightly that you will inevitably begin to build conspiracy theories. But there is a simple explanation for all this. Everything wears out, and savings on maintenance and the human factor become a trigger for all sorts of incidents in production.

Source: http://www.trendforce.com/