16Nov/16Off
The CTA, on CE Retail Holiday Sales, CES 2017 Tech Trends (Shawn DuBravac)
With Black Friday already off to the races, the Consumer Technology Association’s chief economist, Shawn DuBravac, provided the CTA’s view on the CE retail and etail holiday sales landscapes. The projections, offered Wed., Nov. 9, when the latest figures were laid bare for media at a NYC-held press conference, had overall retail holiday sales growing 3.8 percent, and electronics retailers’ overall sales dipping 2.9 percent, but the subset of online CE sales rising 16.4 percent – and CE sales transacted through mobile devices up a mind-bending 45.2 percent. However, overall consumer holiday spending on tech, said CTA, is expected to increase about 3.1 percent over 2015 results.“Existing categories are strong, and emerging tech will be up in gift-giving. Online, led by mobile, defines the growth profile,” he remarked in explaining the numbers.
DuBravac cited UHD 4K sales growth trending at 40 percent up, year over year, with 4.5 million units primed to ship to retailers in Q4 alone.
Emerging categories, too, will draw heavy consumer interest (and dollars), he said. These include wearables, smartwatches, digital media, streaming devices and drones – with drones expecting to clock 1.2 million unit sales this holiday period. Further, CTA projects 700,000 Virtual Reality (VR) headset sales, with more than 50 percent of those 2016 sales happening in these last eight weeks of the year. Other projections for the holidays: saleso 5.5 million smartwatches, and 12.6 million fitness tracking devices.
DuBravac also crystallized what he viewed as five CES 2017 tech trends to watch.
They are:
- The new voice of computing – DuBravac pointed out that by next year, the word error rate in voice recognition technology will have decreased from 23 percent (in 2013) to zero (that is, human parity). “This will be a huge influence on technologies and products shown at CES,” he said. “The next computer interface is voice,” which is on the way to usurping GUIs, and will manifest at CES 2017 as “faceless computing.” He also noted the increasing focus on hub devices (like Amazon Echo) for vocal computing, with companies at CES expected to show products offering more and more integration capability with these devices.
- Connections and computations – The trend of increasingly intelligent systems connecting diverse objects. This trend points to “an increasingly autonomous life” and particularly touches wearables/health/fitness/sports devices and smart home products – the latter, currently representing a $25 billion market globally.
- Transportation transformation – DuBravac pointed to the 200,000 square feet being allotted to self-driving cars and driver-assist technologies at the January show. “Auto makers are introducing cars models at CES now versus at car shows,” he said in underscoring the trend.
- AI’s (Artificial Intelligence’s) rise and its infusion into lives and businesses
- Digitizing the consumer experience – The future of entertainment is seated in VR and AR (Augmented Reality). “There’ll be a few surprises at CES,” he said. “It’s an extremely exciting time and CES 2017 (which marks the 50th anniversary of the show) begins the journey of the next 50 years.”
See the original post here; http://www.dealerscope.com/article/cta-ce-retail-holiday-sales-ces-2017-tech-trends/