Panasonic reports loss of $9 billion

According to that article, sales in consumer electronics, particularly televisions, were below what they expected. I just don't get it. Panasonic makes the best plasma overall and the best plasmas for the money according to pretty much every website on the internet. I guess many people these days still don't bother reading reviews online? I'm curious to know how the LCD and plasma departments did individually. Maybe it's just the LCD panels that are the problem. Or maybe their marketing lags behind Samsung. Also, it's not like Panasonic has a price premium on their televisions like Pioneer did.

Ugh, rabble, rabble, rabble. I would hate do see Panasonic lose it's momentum in plasma development (or drop plasmas all together). There has to be a largest enough market of people who care about quality!

people this days buy the cheapest/first thing they see and many people are scare of plasma TVs...i was one of them but i pull the trigger on a ut50 last week...lets see how it goes!!!!

It has nothing to do with reading online reports, since most people dont do the research, as PRBR said, they go into a store and either buy the one they can afford or the cheapest\most expensive one that the store has. Its a very very small percentage of actual buyers that go online and do research into the TV they want to purchase. Especially in this economy people are not buying premium sets, they are buying the cheaper ones and usually the ones they can find at Walmart\Target\ect which tend to be LCD.......TVs are not a luxury most can afford to upgrade currently, the people you find on forums and posting online are in the GREAT minority.....As far as Marketing, Samsung will beat out Panasonic each and every time, you cant go to a channel without seeing an ad for a Samsung producct, which people relate to all of their products....I cant remember the last time I saw a Panasonic TV commercial, Samsung I can see those daily...

I said it before and I will say it again most mfg's eat up their overhead by offering too many models an entry,mid and high end model should suffice.

If quality consumer electronics sold well enough to be profitable, Pioneer would still be making flat panel TV's. It's getting harder to convince the public to spend more, sometimes a lot more, on a TV, especially now with the economy so bad. Commodity prices like gasoline and cheese are up, and incomes haven't gone up. That effectively leaves less money to spend on other things, even for big corporations.
BTW, I can't imagine that the plasma TV business alone is the cause of a 9 billion dollar loss for Panasonic. I doubt that plasma is a 9 billion dollar industry all by itself. They need to lay off a lot of people, just to stay in business. These folks won't be buying a new upscale TV in the near future either.

Nobody is buying TVs anymore, everyone wants Tablets... I won't be surprised when we start seeing "HUGE TV-sized tablets" that people just carry with them [somewhat exaggerated]. Honestly, I'd hate to be either a desktop-PC manufacturer, or a TV manufacturer in these times.

Pioneer was lucky to have died when they did, because now the remaining manufacturers are going to suffer a slow decline into who-knows-what...

Hello,
I only pray that 2013 is not the last year for Panasonic PDP's. While many dismiss the reports of Panasonic abandoning the TV Market altogether, it often seems where there is smoke, there's fire.

After the 2012 PDP redesign, even if there are new PDP's, I would only guess that it would involve slight tweaks to the current panels.
Cheers,
AD

That is interesting to think about. TV manufacturers seem to be running out of things to market. It seems like the big impetus in the past 10 years was replacing big ugly and heavy CRTs with thin televisions as well as the leap to HD. Now they're trying 3D, but that hasn't really caught on. There's talk of 4K being the next big thing, but I don't really see it. 4K will really only be noticeable with very large TVs, and unless they make them much cheaper, that won't catch on. Incremental improvements in picture quality just isn't going to make people buy new televisions. I know people on these forums are excited about OLED, but what does that give you? Potentially better picture quality and thinner televisions than the already super thin TVs we have now? I don't think the general population will care.

We're looking at a near time future of only LCD! I can't take it!

What a disaster.

They seem to have no clear plan to turn things around yet either.

What about OLED? That might replace both LCD and plasma in the future.

This is where I believe you are wrong. Who wouldn't want a 'retina' display 55-65" TV? I sure as heck know I would!

Panasonic had projected a US$ 1B profit at the beginning of their fiscal year, wildly off from the US$ 9.6B loss recorded. Consensus of outside analysts was that they would have a ca US$ 300-400M loss, also wildly off. The restructuring costs were over US$ 4.4B while Panasonic had projected ca US$ 400M. These differences are so monumental that one questions the truthfulness of their projections from the start of the fiscal year. The outside analysts could well have been off because of their dependence on the accuracy of the information Panasonic had previously reported.

Yes that would be amazing, but we would also need a corresponding increase in media delivery to feed these sets. (The 4K sets have 16x as much data that need to be delivered, and that's hard to do by compression alone without cutting into image quality, defeating the purpose of the higher resolution). Price will always be a factor in getting these kickstarted.

If people wouldn't buy VT-50s at their price--why would they buy OLEDs at HIGH PRICES?

How many times here have we heard about Pioneer going under because Kuros used to simply cost too much?

We have LCDS that suck--satellite that COMPRESSES everything and subchannels on local stations guaranteeing that the main channels don't look as good.

Why is that? Why is HD not so HD?

So that Hollywood can make boatloads of money on streaming or Blu-rays!

That's the only place where you can get a picture that doesn't suck!

That's the only place where the picture makes up for the fact that LCD sucks!

Get rid of plasma--if you perfect plasma past Kuro quality then who would want to actually go to the movie theater?

Make OLED cost SO MUCH that it won't affect the Blu-ray streaming business and you can make a boat load of money on it from the few who will shell out trillions for it.

And why you're at it--at Wal-Mart--get rid of 240Hz--only sell 120 Hz so LCD will suck even more!

We are doomed! Technology doesn't always go forward--sometimes it goes backwards for awhile--can you say the end of the muscle car era--can you say the end of Quadraphonic?

The LAMEST thing ever heard around here is DEFENSE of technology that sucks because that's what people want to buy.

At a video enthusiast site WHO CARES what people want to buy?--isn't it more important what is the best quality and performance that they buy?

If you get your rocks off on the poor quality that they buy do so at a business site--you'll be very happy reading about the millions that they make by selling junk!

It won't be long til the quality gets to the level of the Chiller channel!

We're talking real horror story--if the world sinks into another recession it will be the fault of LCD!

Bury your Kuros--bury all plasmas--link hands together and sing Bye Bye Miss American Pie!

4K resolution might be advantageous at those screen sizes. The problem is, who can afford a 55-65" TV? Not the general population. The only way they could get people to replace their current TV's would be to make those screen sizes substantially less expensive, with or without 4K. That's not happening anytime soon, as the profit margins on large TV's are already paper thin at this point. Add 4K and the situation is even worse.

Now I know you're "taking the piss."

I just don't know. there have been far too many instances of Japanese businesses knowing of problems internally but being unwilling to admit it publicly or even to government regulators until the house comes tumbling down. I hope that is not the case but I am not taking it for granted.

Estimates which are so far different from reality should at the least have some of those responsible being sacked, but that is often not the case in Japan unless their creditors place pressure on management.

I like the way you put it all out there. Unfortunately I believe you are correct in what you say.

I don't see 4K ever making it because we have so many flaws with current HD do to compression take for example all the threads complaining about the picture quality of this station or that from most of the cable/sat providers and then there is OTA instead of using their bandwidth to send out a nice signal they divide it up so they can have 2.1,2.2 and 2.3 same with cable lets compress it so we can add more junk channels quantity before quality.
The cheap sets sell because they don't look that bad with the crappy source thats being fed to them so they sell its only when they plop a Blue Ray in that they realize how much of a difference the quality set would make.

I totally agree with you oztech, the compression I'm getting from Brigthouse is just ridiculous. ...When stuff moves fast on screen, that area of the screen gets MEGA-BLOCKY! The pixel resolution literally looks worse than 320x280 in the fast areas, and with my 50" Kuro, those blocks are probably a quarter-inch in length & width. Luckily it's just their ghetto compression methods, and if they wanted to fix it they easily could.

I personally have no immediate interest in 4K, plus if I wanted to play FarCry 3, and BF3 on a 4K TV, I'd have to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a new gaming rig just to run them with VSync on. In conclusion, 4K needs to sit on the back-burner for another 6 to 8yrs, because there's no way I'm making that transition until some time after 2018 (or whenever my Kuro starts to fail, in which case I have a spare anyway ).

So with this economic news what do you think will happen with the 2013 models??
will they still come out with plasma models next spring??
you can get a VT50-65 for about 3grand now on amazon
and im wondering if i should jump on that price or wait untill next year
to see what they have

You should definitely get it now or wait until next year.

^haha, that was decisive.

Lol....yeah if not now,do it later!

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/440849/sharp_warning_it_may_collapse_surprises_few/

Sharp is also in trouble.

I for one welcome our Samsung overlord.