Big screen televisions are in a boom market right now thanks to falling screen prices and increasing memory prices. This year, sales of LCD televisions 70 inches or bigger are expected to hit 30.11 million units, up from 16.74 million units in 2022. The LCD panels that constitute a substantial chunk of production costs are getting cheaper: The large-volume transaction price of a 75-inch LCD panel is down 70 percent over the past decade to $239 per panel as of 2026. Meanwhile, 85-inch LCD panels are down 60 percent to $310 per panel. One thing making larger televisions somewhat more appealing to consumers is, ironically, a component getting more expensive. Every modern television contains DRAM for short-term data storage, and the AI boom has made DRAM very expensive and in shortage. Thing is, though, every television has DRAM in it, and for smaller televisions, it’s a much larger chunk of the cost of producing them; for a 32-inch set, the circuit board is 37 percent of component costs, but on a 75-inch set, it’s 20 percent. That means that even though DRAM is getting pricier, the impact on the component cost of smaller sets is significantly higher than on the larger sets, where more of the production cost is in the LCD screen itself.
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