CD and DVD market shrinking – but not very fast

The Santa Clara Consulting Group has released a report on the current optical disc market. While optical discs are still used they are often replaced with other storage technology or other ways of accessing content, such as streaming video and music. The oldest recordable optical disc, the Compact Disc Recordable (CD-R) saw a decrease in revenue of nearly 6% in the third quarter of 2012 compared to the previous quarter of 2012. The entire market is good for about $90 million.

Also CD burners were hardly sold and have become pretty much obsolete as the technology is also build in to DVD and Blu-ray writers. There were nearly 500.000 million CD-Rs sold, which is about 98% of the CD recordable market, only 2% of the recordable CDs were CD Rewritable discs.

Of all discs sold, the most are in North and South America which account for 49% of the sales, Europe takes up 28% of the market, Asia 15% and Japan 8%.

DVD recordable technology based products are also slightly sold less, but sales only went down 1% in the third quarter compared to the second quarter of 2012 with a total sales volume of $732 million. In this number both PC recorders and VCRs with optical disc drives. Together they made up about $600 million of the revenue, with the remaining $132 million was due to the sales of recordable media.

There were 0.25% more burners sold, mainly caused by an increase in production of PCs. Of the PC drives, 78% is slim line and the rest half height.  Of the drives sold almost all of them support all formats (CD, DVD-R/W, DVD+R/W, DVD-RAM) but the majority (97%) of the discs sold were DVD-R and DVD+R discs.

Most of the discs are sold in North and South America, they represent 39% of the sales, Europe takes about 27% of the discs, Japan 24% and the rest of Asia 10%

Blu-ray recordable discs are only a small part of the market and unfortunately the Santa Clara Consulting Group did not disclose any numbers on them, but does  mention that these discs offer better margins which help the profitability of the optical disc business in the coming time.