Big screen plasma TVs are about to get a lot cheaper. Matsushita Electric Industrial, better known as Panasonic, unveiled a 65-inch plasma TV on Thursday that will go on sale in Japan in October for under 1 million yen.
In U.S. dollars, the TV will cost $9076. Falling below the 1 million yen mark in Japan could be an important symbolic breakthrough for such large-screen, flat-panel TV prices, and compares very favorably with Panasonic's current 65-inch PDP television that sells for between 1.3 million yen (about $11,825) and 1.6 million yen ($14,550) depending on the retailer. A 61-inch set from Sony costs around 1.6 million yen.
While the price drop is considerable, it's all the more impressive because the new set has more advanced features including a brighter, crisper display. The display in the new set can show "full high-definition" images, which are regarded as 1080 horizontal line resolution widescreen, whereas the current model can manage 768-line images.
Other improvements include 26 percent lower power consumption, so it should be cheaper to run, the company says.
Part of the reason that Panasonic has been able to drop the price is because it makes the display panel in its own factory, says Akira Ikenouchi, a company spokesperson. This gives Panasonic cost savings that some competitors miss out on because they can't produce their own plasma or LCD panels in-house, he says.
Fierce Competition
The pressure to reduce prices stems from fierce competition in the flat-panel TV market. TV makers are battling for customers to avoid being squeezed out of the market, and are sacrificing profit to attract them as the market expands quickly. In the first half of this year in Japan, shipments of PDP TVs were 157,000 units and those of LCD TVs were 1.8 million, up 17 percent and 72 percent on the first half of 2004, according to figures from the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Association (JEITA).
A similar level of competition is happening in several corners of the consumer electronics industry and is pulling down profits at big companies like Panasonic. For the last several quarters, many companies here have been reporting growing sales but falling profits as a result of the competition.
Alongside the new 65-inch TV, Panasonic also announced three other big-screen PDP sets on Thursday. They have screen sizes of 50-inches, 40-inches, and 37-inches and will cost $5275; $4000; and $3092 respectively.
Panasonic plans to sell the sets outside of Japan but hasn't set an overseas launch date or prices.
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