Yesterday Asia Optical’s chairman reported they are expecting to up their shipments of pico projectors from 250,000 upwards inline with a global 8 million pico-projectors in 2010 and 20 million in 2011 – thats a 250% increase on 2010! Robert Lai, the chairman of Asia Optical told digiTimes about this expected huge surge in shipments of pico projectors yesterday, citing data saying that the built in pico (embedded pico projector) market global shipments are expected to reach eight million pico projector units in 2010, 20 million in 2011 and 34 million units in 2012. It didnt stop there though – 54 million units in 2013, 77 million pico projectors in 2014 and a huge 116,000,000 pico projectors to ship in 2015.

Its difficult to say how many of these numbers are sheer speculation, and being the chairman of a huge pico projector manufacturer you can see why such speculation would be useful. On the same level though its also possibly true that knowone knows the market better than the chairman of a huge pico-projector manufacturing company.

Asia Optical’s Chairman Robert Lai’s predictions of global pico projector shipment count’s for the coming years:

• 2010 – 8 million pico projector’s to ship
• 2011 – 20,000,000 pocket projectors to ship
• 2012 – 34 million pico-projectors to ship
• 2013 – 54 million pico-projectors to ship
• 2014 – 77 million pico-projectors to ship
• 2015 – 116 MILLION pico projectors to ship!?

Amongst the good reasons to trust the predictions of Asia Opticals chairman is the companies relationship with Microvision – the ShowWX was in fact launched between the two companies and in 2010 Asia Optical expects to ship 250,000 show wx units. Based on these reported figures on the MicroVision (MVIS) Showwx will represent 3.1% of the total micro projector market for 2010. This doesnt seem shocking to me and could certainly point to accurate figures, but could the pico projector market really grow to 14.5 times its current size in the next 5 years?

If the pico projector market does double in the next 12 months (seems feasible based on growth rates we have seen so far)  then certainly it will be an interesting time for the microProjector. More sales will mean more research and development and a faster improvement curve.

Asia Optical clearly is banking on this projection (pun intended) rollout, working with a US client to come up with a 150 inch outdoor display device – could this be microvision working on another pico projector? to reach 150 inch laser projection will certainly be an option, especially when they say its intended to be an “energy-saving” device. Furthermore they are intending to start work on a 3d pico projector within 2010 so we may just see some bigger things from Asia Optical.