Almost everything is more expensive than ever, but televisions are at rock bottom. It is the result of a “suicide pact”

Technology is in an economic shaker. If we consumers have become accustomed to something, it is that, as the years go by, a product drops in price, even if it is updated with better features. It is clear in the console segment: as each generation progressed, the hardware improved and the price fell. That’s over.

Buy a PS5 or an Xbox Series in 2026 It is more expensive than when they came out in 2020. But the consoles They are not the only thing that rises: There is more competition than ever in streaming services and they have all agreed to raise prices from time to time. It’s not just technology: dwellingmedical expenses, cars, meal… However, There is something that has collapsed: televisions.

Because although there are very expensive models, the price of televisions has fallen more than almost any other consumer product in the last quarter of a century. And we owe it all to something that one of the industry’s leading glass manufacturers named in a curious way.

A 25-year suicide pact. Although there is something else in the equation, something much more important.

The “suicide pact” and the mother glass

You can say in the comments if you have been walking around a large area this Christmas and have been tempted to buy a new 65-inch TV. Not because you need it, but because you saw it at a ridiculous price. For 400 eurosyou can buy one right now. Inch/price, they are much more attractive than the 24 inches that you can put in the kitchen.

These prices on huge televisions do not seem to have been affected by the multiple crises we have experienced in recent years. What if that of the chips, then transportation, that of the Ukrainian warthe current RAM… The price of televisions has followed suit and, although the most cutting-edge OLEDs or risky technologies They have very high pricesan LCD TV is very affordable.

In Construction Physics They mention a very interesting fact. In a advertisement On Black Friday 2003, a barely 20-inch LCD television in 4:3 format with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels (laughing) cost $800. In the same ad, 32-inch CRT TVs for $380 or 27-inch TVs for $150. Today, those TVs are gold for playing retro games, by the way.

In Xataka already we started having to talk about different technologies of liquid crystal panels. 21 years ago we were already talking about OLEDs when I was content with a small 15-inch TFT screen to play ‘Age of Empires 2’ and ‘Half Life 2’. In the end.

But well, I’m going around the bush. In 2022, Mark J. Perry published in AEI the following graph:

He shows us in a crude way what he was saying: the price of LCD technology had been plummeting rapidly while other goods and services increased dramatically. It’s funny to me that I don’t see the computer hardware on the list, we’ll see when I update the graph in a few years…

He estimated that, since 2000, the price of televisions had fallen 97%. There are others informationbut the conclusion is the same: prices through the floor in a short time. That crash occurred a decade earlier. In a document of Corningone of the largest glass manufacturing companies, noted the following:

“LCD technology continues to grow and there are abundant opportunities to expand both the functionality and performance of displays. So the expansion of LCD technology must be a great success story, right?”

“FAKE”

In the document, it is clarified that for consumers it is great news because they can access better and bigger televisions at a fraction of the price. Even other technologies such as plasma had to be adapted. In the same Black Friday ad from 2003 we see a Daewoo of 42 inches with 480p resolution for $2,300. I remember that a 50-inch Samsung 1,080p arrived at my house for 700 euros in 2007.

However, for the manufacturers, it was not as happy a story as it was for the consumer.

“The LCD platform looks like a 25-year suicide pact for display manufacturers,” Corning noted in its report. It is a segment “characterized by hypercompetition, excess investment and periodic lack of profitability, but which at the same time requires sustained investment to differentiate a product that has a low return.”

They pointed out that, within that chain, glass manufacturers were still able to make considerable profits, although there was increasing pressure.

But that price drop is not limited to extreme competition between a few companies. There is something else behind it, and that “something” is the “mother glass.”. Known as “mother glass” in English, it is a main element in the manufacture of LCD panels.

It’s a process which is made up of several stages. On the one hand, there is that mother glass, which is a sheet of glass substrate on which other layers are deposited. Broadly speaking:

• We have the glass plate on which layers of semiconductors are deposited. Using a photolithography process, TFT transistors and pixel electrodes are marked across the entire sheet. It is something that is repeated several times until the active matrix on the mother glass is completed.
• The next step is to use another mother glass to which RGB color filters and electrodes are applied. Both glasses are well cleaned, aligned and sealed with perimeter glue. It’s like a sandwich.
• There we would have a mother glass with many screens, and the next step is to cut them to obtain individual modules.
• The fourth step is to combine those modules or cells with backlight units, the control PCB and the metal casing to have the complete LCD module. It is tested and, when it is ready, it is delivered to the assemblers, who are the ones who already create monitors, televisions, mobile phones or anything with a screen.

Here you can see the process:

What is the key? That those large sheets of glass have been increasing in size little by little. They have been getting to know each other as generationsand a lot of end panels can come out of a single sheet. The higher that generation is, the more panels can come out, which reduces the cost per panel.

Some analyzes show that going from a fourth generation mother glass to a fifth generation one reduced the cost per inch by around 50%, being exponential in more recent generations. Six 70-inch panels are taken from Gen 10 glass. From one Gen 10 only two would be taken.

This implies a brutal reduction in costs, and explains how we can buy huge televisions at ridiculous prices.

And China arrived

This also makes it more profitable for manufacturers to produce large-inch LCD televisions (OLEDs play in another league), and explains why there are smaller sizes that are being abandoned. And an agent who has had great weight in this transition towards the big inch is China.

Manufacturers from the Asian giant began to invest in factories specialized in Gen 8.5 and 10.5 panels. We have already seen that the larger the mother glass, the more televisions per plate, and it is estimated that, at a certain point, production capacity grew faster than demand.

This has generated an oversupply of panels that has forced prices to drop. BOE and TCL are the world’s two largest panel companies. The market share is esteem by around 20% each, especially for panels from 43 to 65 inches.

LG would be the third in contention, and then there is Innolux (which supplies Samsung, also LG and other manufacturers), Sharp or HKC. That is to say, there are few panel manufacturers, despite the fact that there are many television brands. And now we also see how TLC can handle the prices it handles.

In fact, this price drop in the LCD segment has provoked There are manufacturers who have left technology in the background to focus on other types of panels, such as OLEDs.

Therefore, although this so-called “suicide pact” with manufacturers increasing their production at a given time and overloading the market had to do with the expansion of LCD, in the end the determining factor was the adoption of large sheets of glass that allowed more televisions to be ‘produced’ per sheet.

In addition to the arrival of Chinese manufacturerswho bet everything on the production of large-inch panels, suffocating the competition and, curiously, benefiting consumers.

It is curious how in the Corning report they already pointed to flexible OLED panels for 2014. The truth is that They weren’t very wrong in those forecasts.

The dark side

But not everything is competition, economies of scale and new players in the market. Although they are the most important factors, in a CNN article Published a few years ago we found an interesting reflection.

The smart tvs They have brought a lot of options unimaginable not so long ago. It is no longer necessary to have devices connected to the television thanks to more powerful processors and more capable systems.

But of course, that implies that we enter our data and, in televisions that have third-party systems, it is possible that the television is cheaper because those companies are the ones that co-finance them.

The larger the base of televisions with that system installed, the more data companies obtain, data that they can sell and with which they make money. And more cases darklike the fear of monitoring or even to espionage by the American CIA.

Images |TCL, Corning

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