NPD DisplaySearch:

In 2011 world­wide TV ship­ments fell for the first time since NPD DisplaySearch began track­ing global TV ship­ments in 2004, slip­ping 0.3% to 247.7M units.

Bear in mind these are ship­ments as in ship­ments into the chan­nel. There are a cou­ple of ways to look at this. One, the sup­ply / dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel is becom­ing more just-in-time. Brands no longer have to stuff the chan­nel as much as before so over­all ship­ments shrinks with­out nec­es­sar­ily hav­ing a neg­a­tive impact on sales to cus­tomers. Or brands waited for inven­tory lev­els to fall way below nor­mal lev­els to ship more TVs into the chan­nel because TV demand expec­ta­tions were uncer­tain due to global eco­nomic woes. Two, maybe brands are focus­ing on larger more expen­sive TVs and on prof­its instead of man­u­fac­tur­ing lots of crappy, cheap ones.

What I’d like to know is not TV ship­ments into the chan­nel but TV sales to cus­tomers. How did that go in 2011?