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To: SemiBull who wrote (3321)	3/19/2002 7:10:20 PM
From: SemiBull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3493

DVD players move to system-level ICs as market grows 24% in 2002, says report URL: siliconstrategies.com EL SEGUNDO, Calif. -- DVD players have emerged as the hottest consumer product in the market today and are expected to grow by 73.3% over a seven-year period, according to a report from iSuppli Corp.'s Market Intelligence Services group here today. DVD player sales grew by more than 31% to $5.25 billion in 2001, up from about $4 billion in 2000, according to the report. iSuppli predicts that DVD player sales will grow to $15 billion in 2006, up from $6.9 billion in 2002. An estimated 30 million DVD players were shipped in 2001, and that number is projected to grow to 43 million in 2002 and then to 125 million by 2006, according to the El Segundo-based company. Still, there are some major challenges for vendors in the market. For example, the new DVD recorder industry has been stymied by a lack of standards. This has required manufacturers to build DVD players and DVD recorders that can play all three prominent formats: DVD RAM, DVD-RW and DVD+RW. "Since there is no standard, backward compatibility is very important," said analyst Jay Srivatsa of iSuppli. "Of the three leading formats, DVD RAM is the least likely to become the industry standard because it is not compatible with most DVD players on the market." System prices are also expected to remain under pressure due to competition among current Japanese and Korean players and the potential entry of suppliers from China. To stave off price erosion, DVD manufacturers are cutting costs by moving towards systems-level chips. Leading manufacturers have integrated into a single chip most of the DVD functions, including the central processing unit, the MPEG-2 decoder, the audio digital signal processor and the NTSC/PAL encoder.