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Regulatory Probe of LCD Market Widens
narramissic writes "Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sharp Corp., Taiwan's AU Optronics Corp., and a U.S. subsidiary of Taiwan's Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corp. on Tuesday said they have been contacted by investigators who are looking into possible anticompetitive behavior in the flat-panel display market. This follows Monday's announcement by LG.Philips LCD Co. that it had been subpoenaed by regulators in the U.S., South Korea and Japan." From the article: "The probe centers on TFT (thin-film transistor) LCDs, according to Samsung. They are used in a wide range of electronics products including flat-panel televisions and computer monitors, laptop computers, cell phones and digital music players. The three companies being investigated are among the largest manufacturers of such displays. The investigation comes on the heels of anticompetition probes in the DRAM (dynamic RAM) and SRAM (static RAM) markets. The DRAM investigation focused on price-fixing, which is when vendors cooperate to set prices artificially."
Good thing this kind of criminal behavior doesn't go on in the market for software!
And yet LCD prices continue to collapse year-on-year whilst getting bigger, brighter and more contrastful (suck on that word, grammar nazis).
So what's bad for the consumer here? Companies still in business making a profit, or killing off all the companies until the one remaining LCD maker can charge the earth for them?
Yes, there is a fine line to tread between organised price fixing to pwn the consumer, and a free market where competition kills off choice, but things aren't black and white, good or bad.
Most of the actual LCD screen manufacturing is done by few companies (like LG and Philips), and mostly in South Korea. The other retail names you all know just slap them inside their plastic housing with their name on the front (like Dell or Sharpe). Similar to how many PC's have one of two brands of manufactured CPUs. The consolidated manufacturing could explain perceived anticompetitive behavior, that and the $2 Billion start-up costs for an LCD fab.
Kevin
Irrational Diversions
I mean, I am all for the consumer, and very anti-price fixing.
But shouldn't these guys be investing their time and resources into industries where price fixing is a REAL PROBLEM that affects the consumer?
I mean, LCD prices plummet month-over-month. An LCD today costs less than half what it cost only 2 years ago for the same size and even higher quality. I would like to see another industry (besides the CPU industry) match that kind of price drop.
What about stuff like high speed access? How come the cost of my high speed goes nowhere but UP, even though all the significant marginal costs (like laying cable + fibre, back-end infrastructure) were done YEARS ago? Why do I still have a bandwidth cap of 60 GB / month download when 100 GB of bandwidth costs essentially nothing nowadays (I can get a 10 TB web hosting plan for $5 a month) ?
The answer, of course, is there is no real competition, or reason for the major ISPs to reduce their prices.
The same can be said of lots of other industries as well. LCDs should be the LEAST of these guys worries.
There seems a fair basis for these claims.
The PC LCD market has been notorious have having a "sweet spot" (the biggest screen you can buy before the prices jumps stupidly)
Right now its 1440*900 19" wide screens - for about 130GBP last time I looked - yet 20" 1680*1080 displays start around 350GBP and go through the roof from there (1500 for the rather nice dell/apple 30" widescreen displays)
Also LCD TVs have not even remotely kept pace with PC screen prices - they still seem to be at prices PC screens were 1-2 years ago for equivalent sizes.
The top end of hardware is usually more expsive - CPUs/GPUs/RAM - the top 1-2 models are never on the same price/performace curve as the rest of the product line, but LCDs really do seem to be extracting the urine.
I'd love to see a little leveling in the fields - especially since I really to want one of the 30" displays - preferably for about half the current price!
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You're in the very small minority. It has been proven time and time again, the American consumer wants the cheapest working shit that they can buy - and then throw it out when it fails.
Walmart's success, airline service, customer (no)service across all industries, etc... are some examples of this attitude - people voted with their money and this is what we have.
The exception to this rule is for status items - cars and homes come to mind.
I loathe the LCD Television - I want the LCD Wall - no - I want the LCD Room constructed purely of LCD Walls. No! more! price! fixing! swines!
Nothing witty
Econ 101:
- You are referring to fixed costs, not marginal costs
- The whole point of fixed costs is that you risk a lot at the beginning to hopefully get a stream of rewards later.
The "there is no real competiton" excuse is whining amongst those who weren't clever enough to make the big investments earlier or can't make them now because of market forces. yes, this is tough for consumers, but that's the market - it goes to those who get in early. You only have a case to whine if your provider has a monopoly by law.The TFT market suffers a shortage every time Xzibit pimps another ride.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This never seizes to amaze me.
... I suggest a good synthetic blend for the winter.
You might want to put some oil on that
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You only have a case to whine if your provider has a monopoly by law.
The real problem starts to occur when companies -- any companies, really -- start to interfere in the political process and win concessions for themselves. Large companies have taken to buying influence in politics and using it as a way to protect themselves from competition. This adversely affects and distorts the market, which needs to have barriers to entry that are as low as possible in order to produce the best outcome for consumers, and operate in a regulatory framework that isn't being manipulated by actors in the market themselves.
Laissez faire on the part of the government with regard to companies would be fine, if the companies were doing the same to the political process. But when companies are habitually attempting to influence politics (on the local, state, and national levels, to a point where it's considered endemic and normal), then there is a valid reason for people wanting to interfere with the companies. You can't judge a company simply on the basis that it's acting according to the law, when it has helped shape the laws itself.
I think this all comes back to a key problem in the U.S. right now: we have forgotten the place of the corporation as an entity. It is not a person, and has no place in the political realm. It has no inherent rights in the same way a natural citizen does; all of its rights are granted, given to it by the citizens because they feel it will be beneficial to do so. It is the duty of corporations to continually justify their existence to the citizenry, because it is to them that they owe it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Similar to how many PC's have one of two brands of manufactured CPUs.
I think this is the key issue. The situation with LCD displays ought to look like the situation with CPUs, but it doesn't.
With CPUs, competition between the two major players has created a price war and feature war, giving consumers more power for less money on a basically monthly basis. Billions of dollars of research have been spent trying to further the cycle of better, faster, cheaper (and recently, more efficiently).
I think that one of the reasons that the LCD market is being investigated is that it doesn't show as much competition as other high-tech sectors that are dominated by a few major players. It ought to be a cutthroat marketplace, where companies are struggling hand-over-foot to outdo each other and deliver a better product to customers for less money. While it's true that prices have come down, it's not the sort of drops that we've seen in semiconductors, and that's a little suspicious. It starts to look as though maybe the major players in LCDs have all gotten together and said "we don't want to get into it like Intel and AMD, so let's agree to slow things down a bit..." and while that may be good for them, it's bad for consumers and also illegal.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."