By Kim Yoo-chul
Staff Reporter
When two companies are separated by $10 billion, they no longer belong in the same league.
That is what is happening to Samsung Electronics and Sony in the television market. It is not Sony but Samsung that is becoming so big that it is entering its own league.
Last year, Samsung expanded its lead over Sony by almost $10 billion in terms of total sales.
The South Korean consumer electronics giant sold $24.4 billion in LCD TVs in 2008, while Sony sold $14.6 billion during the same period, DisplaySearch, a market research firm, said in its report.
Samsung captured the biggest share of 21.9 percent, followed by Sony with 13.1 percent share and LG Electronics ranked third with 11.2 percent, selling $12.5 billion.
Japan's Panasonic and Sharp were the fourth and fifth biggest LCD TV sellers, respectively, with an 8.2 percent and 7.4 percent share.
"The share gap with Sony in terms of total sales has expanded to 8.8 percentage points, up from 5.4 percentage points in 2007," Samsung spokesperson Kim Se-hun said.
This result comes amid a call by the company's head of its device solutions unit, Lee Yoon-woo, to beat its rivals.
Lee's latest call was made at Wednesday's strategic management meeting held in its plant in Giheung, Gyeonggi Province.
Lee is responsible for the company's two main pillars ― semiconductor and LCDs.
For LCD TV sets, Samsung is planning to keep its aggressive pricing stance in North America, Europe and emerging markets.
"By launching better TV sets, we will challenge ourselves to capture the top spot for the fourth consecutive year," Yoon Boo-keun, chief of Samsung's visual display division said.
In 2008, shipments of LCD TVs increased 33 percent to 105 million, accounting for 51 percent of overall TV shipments in the year, against the 42 percent for old-fashioned cathode-ray tubes (CRT) TVs. DisplaySearch said Samsung sold 21 million LCD TVs in 2008, followed by Sony with 14.8 million and LG Electronics with 11 million.
"The share of LCD TVs thus exceeded that of CRT TVs for the first time ever on an annual basis," the research company said.
But global shipments of flat-panel TV sets during the fourth quarter of last year fell slightly.
The drop, the first since the U.S. research firm began the survey in 2005, stemmed from slumping consumption on the back of the global economy's downturn and price drops, it said.