Video Conferencing Sales Weaken in 2Q

What a difference two quarters can make; the worldwide video conferencing market reached a market record in fourth quarter 2011, but dropped 27 percent by second quarter, according to new data from IDC.

The research firm reported challenging market conditions in the second quarter of 2012, with video conferencing revenue of $564 million, a decline of 10.0 percent year over year and 6.9 percent quarter over quarter.

Video vendors blamed the economic environment and cutbacks in public sector spending for the week result. "Although these factors are expected to persist and influence results somewhat in the second half of 2012, interest in video continues to grow among organizations, especially those with good use-case requirements," said Rich Costello, senior analyst, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure, at IDC.

Petr Jirovsky, senior research analyst, Worldwide Networking Trackers, added that adoption is being driven by video integrations with vendors’ UC and collaboration portfolios as well as video use among small workgroup, desktop and mobile users. "Video as a key component of collaboration continues to place high on the list of priorities for many organizations," Jirovsky said.

From a market segment perspective, multicodec immersive telepresence continues to decline rapidly with a 38.4 percent year-over-year drop, but all other segments were also down in the mid-single-digit range on an annual basis.

Regionally, Asia/Pacific significantly outperformed the other regions and grew 11.3 percent year over year in second quartger. Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) decreased 20.7 percent year over year and North America decreased by 16.4 percent year over year.

Cisco’s second quarter results a 23.7 percent year-over-year decline were worse than the overall market. Cisco remains the market leader but now holds 41.9 percent of the market, which is noticeably below the 48.7 percent in first quarter 2012 and 49.3 percent in second quarter 2011.

Polycom’s revenue increased a 8.9 percent over the first quarter, but was still down 4.3 percent year over year. Polycom’s market share now stands at 32.5 percent, up from the 27.7 percent in first quarter 2012 and from 30.5 percent in the year ago second quarter.

Earlier this year, IDC reported the worldwide enterprise video conferencing market grew to approximately $2.7 billion in revenue in 2011, a 20.6 percent  year-over-year growth rate.  At the time IDC projected 2012 revenue to grow to $3.2 billion, a growth rate of 18.7 percent.