A bad economy has a way of redefining the way we think about success.
For the consumer electronics industry, this holiday season may fairly be described as "less bad" than last year, according to a recent market analysis from NPD Group.
Over the five weeks leading up to Christmas, NPD tallied $10.8 billion in consumer electronics sales, which amounted to a 1 percent decline from last year, but still enough to count as a significant improvement in the trend. After all, in 2008, spending in the segment was down 6 percent from the previous year's holiday shopping season.
But NPD's analysis, confined to the latter part of the holiday shopping season, might, if anything, underestimate the overall performance of the consumer electronics industry.
"The dynamics of the holiday season changed this year," NPD Vice President Stephen Baker said in a statement. "The holiday season started before Black Friday as retailers ran Black Friday-like sales throughout November."
The second week that NPD measured, ending Dec. 5, posted the strongest increase over the comparable period last year, with sales climbing 3.7 percent. The final week, ending Dec. 26, also posted a slight increase of less than 1 percent.
The other three weeks notched modest declines.
By category, notebook PCs had the strongest showing. From data collected from its panel of retailers, NPD estimated that unit sales of notebooks were up 68 percent from last year. The average individual selling price was down 23 percent, but the surge in volume still gave the category a 30 percent increase in revenue for the season.
At the other end of the spectrum, flat-panel TVs saw a 16 percent increase in units sold, but overall revenue was down 12 percent.
But Baker concluded that it was more than just price that determined which categories were winners and which languished during the holidays.
"Just cutting prices this year was not enough to guarantee successful sales results," Baker said. "Flat-panel TVs had a disappointing holiday because there wasn't enough price-cutting on the right items, while notebook PCs and camcorders offered new form factors and price points that drove enormous increases in units and revenue despite falling prices."
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