Slight Holiday Downtick for Consumer Electronics

Hey, it could have been worse. Retailers headed into the holiday season knowing that the economy was still a long way from healthy, but according to a recent market analysis, the consumer electronics came close to breaking even with last year. e-Commerce Guide has the details.

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.”

Read the full story at e-Commerce Guide:


Consumer Electronics Sees Slight Holiday Decline