China’s smart projector market sold 2.056 million units in the first half of 2026, down 26.0% year on year, with revenue of 3.34 billion yuan — a little under $470 million at current rates — down 27.0%. The figures come from Beijing research firm RUNTO and cover channel sell-in excluding laser TVs. They also mark the ninth consecutive quarter of year-on-year contraction: the decline started in the second quarter of 2024 and has not stopped since. Second-quarter volume this year came in below one million units, the first time a single quarter has broken that floor since 2022.
For a category that was the loudest growth story in Chinese consumer electronics five years ago, that is a hard landing. And because China is where most of the world’s affordable projectors are designed, specified and priced, what happens there tends to arrive on Amazon and at European retail about two quarters later.
The more interesting half of RUNTO’s data is the mix. Models rated below 500 lumens still account for 57.5% of units sold, but that share fell 14.9 percentage points in a year. Everything above it grew: the 500 to 1,000 lumen band gained 6.6 points, the 1,000 to 1,500 band gained 10.0 points, and even the rarefied 3,000-lumen-plus segment picked up 1.6 points. Resolution moved the same direction — Full HD holds around 60% of the market, while 4K UHD reached 14.7% of units, up 3.6 points.
Two things are happening at once here. Buyers who wanted a cheap projector for the sake of having one already bought it, somewhere between 2020 and 2023, and are not replacing it. The buyers who remain are the ones who care whether the picture survives a lamp being switched on, and they are being sold brighter machines at roughly the same price points as last year. That is the definition of a market that has stopped growing and started maturing.
One caveat travels with those brightness bands, and it matters more outside China than inside it. Entry-level single-chip LCD projectors in the Chinese market are routinely quoted in a house lumen figure that has no relationship to ANSI or ISO measurement — a machine advertised at 800 “lumens” frequently measures under 200 by either standard. Some of the upward drift in the brightness mix is real engineering. Some of it is a specification arms race with no referee.
Concentration is rising as the market shrinks. RUNTO puts the top ten brands online at more than 70% of unit sales and more than 85% of revenue, both up on the same period last year, with online channels responsible for over 80% of the market overall. In a growing market a hundred no-name brands can coexist; in a market down a quarter, distribution and after-sales cost money that only volume pays for, and the tail gets cut.
Except that the tail has not disappeared — it has emigrated. Look at Amazon’s current projector best-seller list in the United States and the top twenty is dominated by brands that barely register in Chinese retail: Magcubic, HAPPRUN, AuKing, CiBest, WiMiUS, ONOAYO, a rotating cast of five-letter storefronts selling 1080p LCD machines between $30 and $100. Those are the same factories, the same panels and the same supply chain that the Chinese domestic market is squeezing out, redirected to a market where price still wins and brand recognition barely exists.
The established names are making the same move with better products. XGIMI, JMGO, Hisense and Dangbei have all spent the past two years pushing harder into the United States and Europe, and the results show in what those markets now get: triple-laser gimbal projectors like the JMGO N1S Ultra 4K at $1,499 that would have cost twice that in 2023, and 1,000-lumen portables with licensed Netflix at prices that used to buy a 300-lumen box with a side-loaded app. Dangbei in particular has built its overseas line around brightness and out-of-the-box streaming licensing rather than domestic price wars, which is a more durable export position than undercutting.
It is tempting to read the numbers as the projector losing to the television, and there is something to that — 100-inch LCD panels in China now sell for less than a mid-range projector cost two years ago, and a television needs no dark room. But the data does not show buyers abandoning big screens. It shows them refusing to buy a bad one twice.
The segments growing inside a shrinking market are the ones where a projector still does something a television cannot: throw a 120-inch image in a rented apartment, fold into a bag, aim at a ceiling. Those are brightness-dependent and setup-dependent, which is precisely where the money and the engineering have moved. RUNTO expects full-year volume to fall again, with low-brightness entry models still holding the majority in the near term while manufacturers push more mid-brightness models into the 1,000-yuan bracket.
For anyone shopping outside China, the practical read is simpler. The pressure that is squeezing margins in Shenzhen is the reason a $500 projector in 2026 does what a $900 one did in 2024, and the reason the cheapest end of the Amazon listings has become an unreadable soup of invented brightness claims. Both of those trends have the same cause, and neither is going to reverse while the home market is still falling.