Germans love watching tv on flat screens which should be as big as possible. From this fact specialized trade businesses may profit a lot. And these urgently need this popularity of flat screens given that prices for tv sets have fallen by about one third over recent years. But due to the fact that consumers nowadays prefer tv sets with big flat screens to devices based on the old tube technology, the average costs for a new tv set even increased from 805 Euros in 2007 to currently 809 Euros.
This positive development is illustrated by the latest study from the Association on research on consumption (GfK) which was carried out on behalf of the German Association for Information Management, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM).
If one looks at tv sets based on the tube technology and those with flat screens separately, an interesting development becomes obvious: in the year 2005 consumers still spent on average 323 Euros on tv sets with the tube technology, in the year 2008 this amount will presumably be about 200 Euros and 180 Euros in 2009. The number of pieces sold is said to fall from 4 million devices in the year 2005 to less than 0.8 million tv sets this year.
Over the same period the number of modern flat screen tv sets sold increased significantly from 1.6 million devices in 2005 to approximately 5.3 million this year. Back in 2005 purchasers spent on average 1333 Euros for plasma and LCD devices. This year this figure will amount to about 880 Euros and 840 Euros in the year 2009. More than 90% of the turnover in flat screen devices is currently generated by sales of HD-ready or Full-HD tv sets. Furthermore, consumers are increasingly buying flat screens having very big screen diagonals exceeding one meter. Prices for this kind of tv have also fallen over recent years so that these have become affordable to a growing number of people. In the years to come average prices are predicted to continue falling, but less rapidly.
This year sales have also been boosted by the European Football Championships and the Olympic Games. In the past it always turned out that the buying incentive which came from major football events was stronger than that from Olympic Games. 