LED Display Marketplace Forecast To Grow At 21% CAGR Through 2026: Futuresource

October 4, 2022 by Dave Haynes

The total LED marketplace is expected to reach sales of some $19.5 billion by 2026, growing at a compound rate of 21%, suggests UK-based research firm Futuresource in its 2022 Global LED Display Market Report.

This is a category in its ascendancy, says the firm in a brief on the fee-based report, with new projections indicating a market of increasing strength and maturity.

This period of extraordinary growth is welcome after a shaky few years. 2020 brought major disruptions, with shipment and transport issues rife, as well as the practical difficulties of installation. With engineers unable to enter indoor spaces, the installation of units came to a standstill. Unlike the smooth and swift fitting of LCD, LED can take days, even weeks, to install.

Considering these hurdles, what’s truly remarkable is the speed of recovery witnessed across the market. By 2021, it was hoped the market would recoup to pre-pandemic levels. The global Direct View LED industry entered recovery in 2021, with many anticipating it to take two to three years before the 2019 value was beaten. Instead, growth has exceeded this level by as much as 10%.

Growth is driven, in part, by R&D and manufacturing advances in LED that Futuresource says are “creating seismic shifts” within the market.

Although sub 1mm and below pixel pitches haven’t grown as fast as other segments, this will soon change. “We can expect LED to surpass LCD and RPC within the decade,” says Ted Romanowitz, Principal Analyst at Futuresource Consulting. “MicroLED will be an important part of that transition. Leaders in MicroLED technology have the capability of mass transferring sub-100-micron chiplets onto a TFT backplane with an active driver technology. Transitions such as these will drive the price down within ten years, to the point where a consumer TV with true MicroLED technology will be available for under three thousand dollars. It will cannibalize the LCD market.”

Two unsurprising observations are that MicroLED and MiniLED will gradually supplant existing LED manufacturing like SMD (surface-mounted), and that LCD is a twilight technology in the commercial display sector (except perhaps for smaller retail merchandising displays and simple uses like menu and numbers – like FIDS – displays).

These dramatic market shifts will see LED sales at nearly three times that of LCD within five years. Just like LCD and OLED today, LED production will increasingly fall into the hands of a few key players. With such changes underway, one thing is clear: brands will need to adapt in order to survive.