China's top color TV maker, Skyworth Digital Holdings, said yesterday its LCD TV sales should nearly double in its current fiscal year, even as overall unit sales decline, with its focus on high-end models.

The company expects to ship up to about 4.8 million LCD televisions, up sharply from the 2.48 million a year earlier, as the thinner TVs gain popularity and China takes steps to stimulate consumption during the global slowdown.

LCD TVs will account for more than half the 8.2 million total TVs the company is aiming to ship in its current fiscal year, which runs through the end of March, down from 9.15 million TVs in the previous fiscal year.

"We're not pursuing volume above all else, we're most concerned with profitability," Chairman and CEO Zhang Xuebin said in Hong Kong. "We want to make high-end products."

Zhang added that traditional cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs only represented about 20 percent of sales in April and May.

The firm sold 1.06 million color TVs in this period.

(Shanghai Daily July 10, 2009)