CES preview: sales growth on flat volume?

Carl Howe over at The Blackfriars Blog is attending the CES preview press event this week and posted some interesting tidbits from yesterday. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)
is predicting a 9% consumer electronics sales growth for the year.
That's not a news flash as there are constantly new and innovate products available. No, the interesting part is that the growth is based upon flat sales volume. Huh?

That didn't compute to me either until Carl explained the CEA's point-of-view. Go back say five years and think about what gifts were hot. It wasn't big screen HDTVs and iPods, it was more likely to be DVD
players or some other item that isn't on the radar today. What kinds of prices were those items five years ago? $100? $200? Maybe a little more?

Now, tell me what the average prices are for the items of today, i.e.;
high-definition televisions and 5G iPods. The prices vary of course,
but in general, demand has grown for the higher priced items, hence the sales growth in terms of dollars. ($123 billion of them, to be exact!)

Read [Thanks for the tip James!]