Sluggish Economy Dents TV Purchase Intent Among US Consumers

It has been revealed that fewer consumers in the United States are intending to purchase television sets, largely due to the sluggish state of the US economy. This is according to a recent IHS iSuppli US TV Consumer Preference Analysis report, which showed that the number of Americans who are planning to make TV purchases has plummeted.

Consumer purchasing TV
Sluggish economy dents TV purchase intent among Americans

In fact, the proportion of American consumers planning TV purchases has now fallen to a record low according to the report. The survey was carried out in the second quarter of this year, with the figures showing that out of all the consumers who had not purchased a television in the previous quarter, only 13 percent were planning to buy a TV set in the next 3-12 months. This reflects a sharp fall from the figure of 32 percent during the first quarter of 2011.

Of those who responded to the survey, 83 percent said that they did not plan to buy a TV in the next twelve months, which represented a sharp increase from the 66 percent who said the same thing during the first quarter of the year. This was the highest level of negative response to the question of whether consumers were planning to buy new TVs since 2010.

The other 4 percent of people who were not considering buying a new TV were those that had actually been given a TV set as a gift, and this figure was 2 percent higher than in the first quarter.

Riddhi Patel, director for television systems and retail services at IHS, said that the buying public have become increasingly prudent due to the economic climate, and that this heightened caution is reflected in the huge shift in preferences when it came to buying a new HDTV display. He said that consumers appeared to be suspending or abandoning their “ongoing love affair with television”.