The novel corona virus pneumonia epidemic has severely affected the LED display industry in 2020. However, as its influence gradually faded, the market began to recover from the third quarter and further recovered in the fourth quarter. This quarter, LED display products shipped 336,257 square meters globally, an increase of 23.5% from the previous quarter.
As the epidemic situation in other countries and regions still affects project progress to a certain extent, coupled with the rapid recovery growth of the Chinese market, China's market share has grown to a record high of 68.9% in this quarter, accounting for 53.9% for the whole year.
After the outbreak of the epidemic, China's economy recovered rapidly. Thanks to relevant policy support from governments at all levels, the performance of China's LED display market continued to improve, and finally achieved a 30.2% growth in shipments for the whole year of 2020. From a market perspective, the demand for video surveillance and audio and video meeting rooms derived from the epidemic continues to grow in a wide range of subdivided application scenarios, and has seen rapid growth in party and government agencies, schools, medical institutions, and Internet companies, which has greatly promoted The rapid development of small pitch and fine pitch products. Small pitch products, especially 1.0-1.5mm dot pitch products, are booming in the control room, command room and broadcast application market. With the gradual liberalization of markets at all levels, public areas, entertainment, hotels, and retail markets have gradually recovered. From the perspective of the supply chain, compared with other countries and regions, China has huge advantages in terms of continuous investment in the upstream supply chain and product production cycle, logistics transportation and installation cycle.
According to Omdia's "LED Display Market Tracker" report, although the actual global shipments in the fourth quarter of 2020 were 0.2% higher than expected, markets other than China are still facing varying degrees of year-on-year decline.
Britain and other major Western European countries closed their cities again in the fourth quarter to avoid further deterioration of the epidemic. Due to manpower constraints, the conflict between the delivery date and the actual installation time has increased, resulting in some projects that cannot be completed as planned. Fortunately, compared with the first large-scale blockade in the first half of 2020, the decline of almost all brands in Western Europe is relatively small, which also shows that the market's ability to deal with similar problems is gradually increasing. In the end, the Western Europe region fell slightly by 4.3% in the fourth quarter of 2020 and 59.8% year-on-year. Compared with other pixel-pitch products, small-pitch products continue to maintain a relatively stable development in enterprise indoor, broadcast room and control room applications.
Eastern Europe, especially the Russian and Ukrainian markets, began to rebound in the fourth quarter of 2020. Although it was still not as good as the same period, it eventually achieved an increase of 95.2% from the previous month. Brands with significant growth include Absen, Leyard and LGE, which increased by 70.2%, 648.6% and 29.6% year-on-year respectively this quarter. In addition, due to the shipment of AOTO and Leyard's small pitch products, this pitch product increased by more than 225.0% month-on-month.
Despite the outstanding performance of a few brands such as LGE and Lighthouse, shipments in the North American market still fell slightly by 7.8% month-on-month and 41.9% year-on-year. Daktronics still maintains its leading position, with a market share of 22.4% in the region. As predicted by Omdia, shipments of <= 1.99mm and 2-4.99mm pixel pitch products have recovered from the decline in the third quarter, increasing by 63.3% and 8.6% respectively from the previous quarter.
Omdia defines a product with a dot pitch less than 2mm as a small pitch. The market share of fine-pitch products fell for the first time under the influence of COVID-19 in early 2020, but eventually reached a record high of 18.7% in the fourth quarter. Chinese LED display brands represented by Leyard, Unilumin and Absen are not only active in this pixel pitch market, but also outstanding in other product categories.
In 2020, Leyard will maintain a leading position in the global LED display market revenue share. Especially in the dot pitch <= 0.99mm market, its shipment share increased to 24.9% in this quarter, followed by Unilumin and Samsung with 15.1% and 14.9%, respectively. In addition, since 2018, products with a dot pitch of 1.0-1.5mm have developed rapidly. Leyard has also maintained an industry leading position and will gain approximately 30% of the market share in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Unilumin began to adjust its product and market strategies from the second quarter of 2020, and stabilized its overall ranking in the second place in the industry. Like Leyard, Unilumin is expanding the upstream and downstream industrial layout of the industry, and continues to penetrate into the product development and production of Mini/Micro LED. While actively adjusting the market strategy, we will continue to increase our own soft and hard power by discussing the common points of the subdivided industries.
Samsung ranked fourth in revenue share in 2020, and achieved extensive shipments in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the latest Omdia "LED Display Market Tracking" report, in the dot pitch <= 0.99mm market, Samsung is the only brand that realizes shipments on all continents.
