TFT LCDs have been replacing the CRTs in the desktop monitor market without haste. Nevertheless, the Korean CRT manufacturers, holding 30% market share for CRTs for monitor use, have been even expanding production capacity for the last couple of years. CRT business is a capital intensive industry. Therefore, if TFTs start to "cannibalize" the CRTs in a real sense, it will be inevitable for them to suffer a great loss from reducing the output by downscaling a significant amount of capacity or pulling out of the business. Under this situation, todays CRT manufacturers are still not successful in establishing an effective strategy for the impending battles between TFTs and CRTs because they can hardly find a comprehensive forecast or information explaining not only "at what price gap" but also "over what time period" the TFTs will replace the CRTs in the desktop monitor market.
The purpose of this thesis is to enable the CRT manufacturers to prepare themselves for the age of the substitution of TFTs for CRTs by showing the essential factors for the substitution as well as the stages of the substitution in line with the changes in such essential factors. In this paper I tried to replenish the existing forecasts and scenarios of consulting and research organizations for CRT makers by creating several forecast based on an academic forecast model, case studies and opinion surveys.
I have verified the several scenarios suggested by me in this paper by analyzing the suppliability of the substitute, TFT LCDs in this case, because TFT LCD manufacturing business is a real capital intensive high-tech industry and it takes 18 months to reach full production from the trial run after construction.
In this paper, it has been proven that the essential factors for the substitution are price, performance and supplying capacity of TFT LCDs. When all essential factors are comprehensively considered, it is forecasted that TFT LCDs will take 7~8% of the world wide desktop monitor market in the year of 2000, 15% in 2001 and about 50% in 2005. But as seen in the number of the substitution scenarios, plural factors affect the substitution and essential factors themselves may be changed in time progress. Therefore it is risky for CRT manufacturers to set their strategy based on any single scenarios. That is why the subject of this paper as well as the corresponding strategies of the manufacturers need continuous replenishments and adjustments in time progress.
