In-Stat: Portable Edutainment Toys a Promising New Semiconductor Market

In-Stat has issued a new report that suggests edutainment toys are a new portable, multimedia application that are a potential growth opportunity for the semiconductor industry. According to In-Stat, "the worldwide market for edutainment toys reached $1.7 billion in 2005, and this figure is projected to hit $5.5 billion by 2010. Drivers for the edutainment market include lower technology costs, increased shelf space in mass-market retailers, and growing parental demand for educational value in children’s toys."

Stephanie Ethier at In-Stat said, “The explosion in the edutainment toy segment is taking place as Moore’s Law has enabled an impressive amount of processing power to be placed in the hands of vendors of consumer education devices. Semiconductor companies now have an opportunity to leverage existing portable multimedia solutions to power products found in the price-sensitive edutainment toy market.”

Key findings include:

• LeapFrog Enterprises and VTech lead the growing number of toy manufacturers that make electronic-based learning toys targeted at young children.
• Parents are spending more money on products with “grow-with-me” features that have software that can be modified to be age-appropriate for the child as he or she grows from month to month.
• In-Stat believes that a typical edutainment product will have an overall BOM of approximately $60 in 2006. The lion’s share of the BOM will be made up by LCDs, MCUs, Flash, and various specialty devices.