Consumer electronics technologies, trends and market

Rajesh Uppal October 28, 2022 Electronics & EW, Industry Comments Off on Consumer electronics technologies, trends and market 284 Views

Technology has changed the world that we live in. Businesses have taken advantage of advances in technology in a multitude of ways, usually as a way to increase productivity or decrease operating costs. Consumer technology has made its way to the forefront of technical applications due to it’s incredible potential to transform business.

Consumer technology is any technology that is built to be used by the general public. It’s ubiquitous nature requires its functions to be accessible to anyone, without any prior knowledge of the system. This differs from commercial and enterprise technology which may require training in order to operate. Think of it like this– you shouldn’t have to teach consumers how to contact your business. It should be straightforward and natural.

Consumer electronics or home electronics are electronic (analog or digital) equipment intended for everyday use, typically in private homes. Consumer electronics are electronic equipment for non-commercial use.

Consumer electronics include devices that provide one or more functionalities such as computers, laptops, mobile devices, smart wearables, television sets, refrigerators, smartphones, and home appliances.

Nowadays, up to 71% of people are working from home, according to Pew Research. The consumer electronics industry has been providing technologies to support this growth. These include devices from Ergonomically-designed furniture and screen technology to deliver crisp viewing experiences with minimal eye fatigue can also be seen in an increasing number of home offices.

As many people have also begun to handle most of their tasks themselves, companies have also begun to provide tools to facilitate the growing DIY trend. Several companies, including Samsung, have shown off domestic robots that can handle everything from dishwashing to laundry and potentially serving drinks. For more hands-on people, getting access to tools like battery-powered cordless airbrushes allows even novices to take on home improvement projects, and other similar items are now attainable as prices have dropped despite expanding feature sets.

Voice assistants, such as Google Home, Siri, and Alexa, enable consumers to control their home appliances with a simple voice command. The integration of consumer electronics, such as speakers, and earphones, with voice assistant equipment, will provide a positive market outlook.

One overriding characteristic of consumer electronic products is the trend of ever-falling prices. This is driven by gains in manufacturing efficiency and automation, lower labor costs as manufacturing has moved to lower-wage countries, and improvements in semiconductor design. Semiconductor components benefit from Moore’s law, an observed principle which states that, for a given price, semiconductor functionality doubles every two years.

Speed is a critical success factor for manufacturers of consumer electronics. Product lifecycles are short, consumer interests change fast, and companies must be agile in their response to stay competitive. Those who are late to recognize shifting tastes or miss the signs heralding the next generation of a product will fall behind. But determining what will be in demand is just one part of the equation. The other, more challenging part is overcoming the technological hurdles and barriers that present themselves during design, development, and production.

Delivering innovative products that are smaller, faster, more durable, more affordable, have better battery life—you name it—is only possible through the successful application of breakthrough technologies and innovative use of materials. This requires assessing and exploring new avenues to find solutions that close the gap between where technology is and where it needs to be

However have become hugely dependent on either their phones, smartwatches, or laptops, is also creating many issues. Statistical data conveys that more than half of the citizens in the U.S. and Canada are highly concerned that the overuse of electronic devices may form damaging health issues, such as digital eye strain (DES), the disruption of healthy sleep patterns, greater chances of anxiety and depression, and a possible addiction that may result in greater measures.

The lack of physical and mental exercise has also been established due to the unhealthy reliance on technology, subsequently leading to obesity, an unhealthy diet, not being able to communicate properly in real life, and difficulties associated with concentrating in school or at work.

Consumer electronics technologies

Wearables, virtual and augmented reality, 4K televisions, smart homes, 3D printers, autonomous vehicles, drones, and communication robots—are just some of the emerging technologies that hope to find a foothold and secure their role in people’s lives now and in the coming years.

The market is one of the fastest-growing industries attributed to the emergence of new technologies. AI, or artificial intelligence, has been the single greatest advancement in technology. AI technology allows applications to continually improve, which allows them to be used in settings like customer experience which are constantly changing. With AI (and some tuning and training from humans), automation technology can be effortlessly used by customers for transformative experiences.

Conversational AI is the set of technologies behind automated messaging and speech-enabled applications that offer human-like interactions between computers and humans. Simply put, it’s how humans can talk with computers as if they were, well, humans. Conversational AI can enable communication like a human by recognizing speech and text, understanding intent, deciphering different languages, and responding.

NLP is an umbrella term which covers Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Generation (NLG), and Dialogue Management. Because the human language is extremely complex, words can mean different things in different contexts. NLP enables Conversational AI technology to make sense of a customer’s language and recognize their intent, and produce a response.

Machine learning is a set of algorithms used to train a computer to perform certain tasks without being explicitly programmed. Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA) utilize machine learning and Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to learn and become more intelligent as they process more and more transactions.

AR and VR initiatives are booming with many examples of virtual meetings, simulations, digital twins, remote collaboration immersive design, and remote marketing and sales. Naturally, support infrastructures like cloud services and 5G adoption will continue to increase in support. This trend won’t be easily reversed even after the pandemic as the new services are reshaping consumer behavior. Companies are leveraging AR for retail applications and delivering enhanced consumer experiences by bringing gifts and artwork to life in the store through smartphone-powered AR experiences.

A number of new innovations include consumer tech, fintech, artificial intelligence/machine learning, robotics, and digital health and healthcare. Digital health, fitness, and wearable technologies continues to be an increasingly hot area for innovation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) continue to undergo rapid innovation growth, leading to advances in function and application of fundamental technologies like NLP & CV, and transformative applications like conversational AI and autonomous systems.

Given the importance of audio and video to next-generation mobile broadband use cases and the burden such traffic puts on networks, media codecs are critically important in enabling some of the most exciting technologies, such as high-quality streaming and video conferencing, VR/AR applications, remote control and fully immersive 360° video and games.

The market trend of integrating microLED technology into televisions for high-resolution density will augment the market expansion. Prominent market leaders including LG, Sony, Samsung, and others have launched microLED TVs for commercial and residential uses.

High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)
HEVC is a video compression standard developed in MPEG, enabling bandwidth savings and reduced storage costs. HEVC is a key technology for delivering Ultra High Definition (UHD) content, which creates high-quality viewing experiences on multiple types of devices including mobile phones, tablets, laptops, TVs, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, streaming devices and drones.

Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

VVC is the next generation video compression standard, developed in MPEG, building further on HEVC. This new codec will cut the bitrate roughly in half, greatly reducing the load of video traffic on networks without sacrificing quality, delivering a more seamless experience for users across devices and services. Furthermore, VVC enables even higher resolutions and new immersive applications such as VR and AR.

Consumer electronics market

The global consumer electronics market size was accounted at US$ 724.48 billion in 2021. According to Precedence Research, the consumer electronics market size is expected to surpass around US$ 1.13 trillion by 2030 and expanding growth at a CAGR of 5.1% from 2022 to 2030.

The surging demand for the various home improvement products and electronic devices for the personal and professional use is driving the demand for the consumer electronics across the globe. The rising disposable income, higher demand for the luxury products, technological developments, and improvement in the standard of living are some of the prominent factors that drive the growth of the global consumer electronics market.

The globe is currently witnessing a huge shortage of semiconductors. Semiconductors are the major components of almost all the electronic devices across the globe. The huge gap between the demand and supply of the semiconductors may result in the high prices of the semiconductors and also leading to the production cuts of the major manufacturers. Therefore, the shortages of semiconductor across the globe is a major hindering factor.

There is a lack of electricity in the rural areas of the developing and underdeveloped countries. Therefore, the lack of electrification is restricting the adoption of the advanced consumer electronic products that may hinder the market growth.

The proliferation of digital technologies has encouraged the integration of the latest technologies such as AI, cloud computing, Wi-Fi, augmented realty, and virtual reality in a wider range of consumer electronics. These advancements are expected to offer huge growth opportunities to the market players.

Segments

The rapid-paced industrialization and urbanization has led to the massive development of the residential sector. The rising residential sector is proving to be beneficial for the increasing adoption of electronic products that will favor the global consumer electronics market growth in the forthcoming years.

The personal application segment is anticipated to witness a 9% growth rate by 2027 on account of the growing spending capacity on discretionary products due to rising income. Falling prices of personal consumer electronics, such as Bluetooth speakers, earphones, smartphones, and smart wearables, are impelling the industry demand for these electronics.

Based on product type, the electronics segment is expected to showcase exponential growth due to the high penetration of consumer electronic devices such as digital cameras, computers, TVs, laptops, and tablets, among others.

The audio & video equipment segment dominated more than 60 % of the market share in 2020, with over 2,000 million new units sold. Proliferation of smartphones and growing preference for smart homes will augment the demand for audio & video equipment. The integration of advanced features, such as enhanced connectivity, voice assistant-enabled control and speech recognition, will impel the acceptance of audio & video equipment.

Based on the product, the smartphone segment dominated the global consumer electronics market. This is attributed to the increased product acceptance and the introduction of numerous innovative features in the smartphones overtime. The presence of multi-functions in the smartphones has significantly boosted the demand for the smartphones among the consumers for personal as well as professional use.

There has also been a trend toward telemedicine and health monitoring, with McKinsey projecting that the market will reach $250 billion soon. Many smartwatch brands have included more sensors on their products for more holistic health tracking, and AI monitoring systems for elderly people have also been deployed to automatically raise alerts when they sense any health issues, even if the affected person is unable to do so themselves.

Based on the distribution, the online is estimated to be the most opportunistic segment. The surging penetration of the e-commerce, rising access to internet, growing urban population, and rising adoption of smartphones are the major factors that drives the growth of the online distribution segment. According to the ITU, around 4 billion people had access to the internet in 2019 and this number is rapidly growing across the globe.

Consumer electronics include devices used for entertainment, communications and recreation.

Entertainment (flatscreen TVs, television sets, MP3 players, video recorders, DVD players, radio receivers, etc.)
Communications (telephones, cell phones, e-mail-capable personal computers, desktop computers, laptops, printers, paper shredders, etc.)
Recreation (digital cameras, camcorders, video game consoles, ROM cartridges, remote control cars, Robot kits, etc.).

Regional Snapshot

North America dominated the global consumer electronics market in 2020. This is simply attributed to the various factors such as high disposable income, huge demand for the high-end products, increased adoption rate of the latest technologies, presence of several leading manufacturers of the electronics, and the high standards of living. The latest advancements in the various electronic products is expected to drive the growth of the North America consumer electronics market in the forthcoming years.

Asia Pacific is the fastest-growing market. The presence of huge customer base, rising disposable income, rising penetration of the e-commerce, and cheap availability of various electronic gadgets. The countries like China and Taiwan specializes in the production of numerous consumer electronics at low cost. Asia Pacific is the manufacturing hub of the globe. The presence of skilled labors at cheap rates and easy availability of raw materials attracts FDIs. The rapid industrialization has played a significant role in the market growth. Moreover, the increasing penetration of the credit cards is expected to drive the demand and sale of the consumer electronic products in Asia Pacific during the forecast period.

Some of the key players in the consumer electronics industry are Samsung Group (Suwon, South Korea), LG Electronics Inc. (Seoul, South Korea), Sony Corp. (Tokyo, Japan), Panasonic (Osaka, Japan), Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Whirlpool Corp. (Benton Harbor, U.S.), AB Electrolux (Stockholm, Sweden), Apple Inc. (Cupertino, U.S.), HP Inc. (Palo Alto, U.S.), Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (Shenzhen, China), and more players profiled.