Why are those low-priced and low-quality Internet TV brands keen on lying about their sales?

The Matthew effect in the Internet TV industry is emerging. The strong are getting stronger, and the weak are getting weaker. This process is accelerating, and the closing of the industry window and the reshuffle are happening at the same time.

It is foreseeable that there will be some drowning victims in the red ocean of Internet TV next year, and the first to drown will undoubtedly be those brands supported by false prosperity.

Those self-entertaining Internet TV brands

In the middle of this year, the China Electronic Commerce Association released a summary of China's half-year flat-panel TV sales. The sales volume of 23 million units was a slight increase over last year. The annual sales volume is expected to hit a new high of 48 million units in recent years.

China Electronic Commerce Association predicts China's TV sales in 2016

It is worth noting that, under the premise that there are currently more than a dozen new Internet TV brands in China that rely on low prices to impact the market, the overall sales of flat-panel TVs have actually increased at the expense of bad money driving out good money, and the living space of high-quality TVs that meet the interests of users has been squeezed. As a durable electronic consumer product, the market environment of TVs trading quality for quantity is not a healthy development, and will inevitably bear bad consequences in three to five years.

Li Dongsheng, chairman of TCL Group, pointed out last year that the growth of color TV companies will be "squeezed growth, and they need to grab things from other people's plates."

There is nothing wrong with grabbing things from other people's plates if you rely on your strength. However, if you become superstitious about low prices and try to make a temporary comeback by reducing quality, it will be a devastating blow to the development of the entire industry.

In addition to low configuration and low price, some Internet TV brands also use self-indulgent methods to complete various tasks, deceiving their superiors and subordinates, and even some brand leaders take the initiative to use various false figures to disguise the bleak situation in order to keep their jobs. For example, it was pointed out in the middle of the year that Cantv, known as the national team, claimed to have sold over a million units, but the actual sales were less than 200,000 units.

In fact, Cantv is not the only Internet TV that is self-satisfied. During the Double 11 period, the foreign brand Sharp TV also relied on fake sales to impact Tmall's Double 11 sales chart. There was no movement in the first minute, and there was no movement in the next minute, but in this minute, hundreds of TVs were sold. I can't help but ask these buyers, did you really receive the unified instruction of "release at 8:20"?

Another internet TV brand that inflates traffic

In China, almost no sales statistics agency tells the truth. Last year, a statistics agency made a joke of two brands competing for first place.

Now, another Internet TV manufacturer that inflated its traffic has surfaced. This time, no statistical agency has endorsed it yet.

At the end of 2015, the Internet TV brand Fengxing set itself a military order: "Ship 12 million sets in three years. Among them, the sales target of 1 million 4K Internet TVs will be achieved before the Spring Festival in 2016."

As 2016 is coming to an end, Fengxing TV recently released some very impressive data: 1.5 million units sold and 1 million activated users. As for why 1/3 of the users have not activated, Fengxing did not give an explanation.

Soon after the data was released, a deep throat revealed that Fengxing TV, which was jointly funded by Fengxing.com, Zhaochi, Gome and Oriental Pearl, had actual sales of only about 200,000 units of its own brand in a year, and sales of OEM products in cooperation with other brands were about 600,000 units.

The sales volume is fictitious, but the numbers are honest. The actual sales volume of 200,000 units vs. the announced sales volume of 1.5 million units. Behind the huge disparity between these two numbers, in fact, major e-commerce brands have already made honest responses.

Taking the just-passed Double Eleven as an example, Fengxing TV’s two main models promoted in its Tmall flagship store were the G65Y-T priced at 3,699 yuan and the G55Y-S priced at 2,599 yuan. Tmall showed that their monthly sales were 528 and 150 respectively.

Monthly TV sales of Fengxing Tmall flagship store during Double 11

On the platform of Gome Online, a shareholder of Fengxing TV, there was basically no trace of Fengxing TV on the homepage of the TV store on Double Eleven. Only Sanyo and Haier, which use Fengxing OS, were slightly exposed. The main players were still traditional brands such as Hisense, Changhong, Konka, and Skyworth. On the JD TV sales rankings, Fengxing TV's sales volume was not included in JD's statistics because it did not make the top ten.

JD.com’s Double 11 TV Sales Ranking

In the Internet TV industry, LeTV is a brand that sells TVs very diligently, with almost all its employees selling online and offline. However, it has only sold 9 million units in three years, and it is extremely difficult to climb to the top of the industry. According to Fengxing TV's forecast of 12 million units in three years, an industry insider joked, "According to this number, the total sales of TVs in China will reach 100 million units in three years, which is enough for this company to sell 10 million units, and that company to sell 10 million units."

The actual sales data of Fengxing TV can be seen from the two major e-commerce platforms, Tmall and JD.com, which can only be described as horrible.

Judging from the search index, Fengxing TV is far behind both traditional TV brands and Internet TV brands, and is basically crawling at the bottom of the data axis with slight ups and downs.

Baidu search index for Fengxing TV

Another problem that makes Fengxing feel uneasy is that the content on Fengxing's forums and bulletin boards is almost entirely dominated by consumers' complaints about product quality.

Quality control is lost and low prices are hard to be popular

The popularity of brand names with good reputations is not popular in terms of market sales.

Fengxing TV previously released three models of Internet TV, 55-inch, 49-inch and 43-inch, all of which use 4K panels from Samsung and LG, but are priced at only 2799, 2299 and 1799 yuan. On the surface, this price has indeed refreshed the bottom line of the Internet smart TV industry.

But is price really a panacea for increasing sales?

With Fengxing TV's powerful publicity campaign on its product functions, as well as the brand influence of partners such as Haier and Gome, combined with its extremely high product cost-effectiveness and riding on the popularity of 4K, Fengxing TV did cause a strong response in the early stages, and pre-orders for the first batch of TVs were also very smooth.

However, when the first batch of users received the goods, things started to get a little out of control.

From the user reviews on the e-commerce platform, we can see that Fengxing TV’s quality control is not very strict.

First, the viewing angle of Fengxing TV panel is not good. When watching from the side, the picture is seriously white, which affects the viewing experience. Secondly, the TV panel has serious bad pixels, and buyers are frequently affected.

In addition, the mold of the TV is rough, which causes the casing to be loose, and dust will get into the inside of the screen and cannot be cleaned.

Serious light leakage issues reported by users

Some consumers have also told us that black spots will gradually appear on the bottom of Fengxing TVs, which is suspected to be a backlight failure and will appear more and more. The included Bluetooth remote control also has quality issues that cannot be ignored. Some people cannot use it when they get it, and a large number of users have reported that it no longer works after a short period of use.

Remote control problems are not isolated cases

What’s more serious is that consumers who bought Fengxing TVs also generally reported that the TVs would go black and fail to boot after using them for a period of time. The official explanation was that it was a software problem and an upgrade method was given, but almost no users believed it. “Can software upgrades cover up the rubbish screen quality?”

Users reported that Fengxing TV had a black screen on standby

It is worth noting that the concept of "super-dimensional ecosystem" proposed by Fengxing means that Fengxing plays a platform role among its cooperative manufacturers. As long as the Internet TV is equipped with the Fengxing platform, it can be regarded as Fengxing TV, such as Haier Fengxing TV, Panda Fengxing TV, Sanyo Fengxing TV, etc.

Since Fengxing TV is jointly undertaken by Fengxing and several other companies in the pre-sales, installation, maintenance and after-sales of the product, the time cost caused by passing the buck between departments also needs to be borne by consumers.

Complaints from users on Baidu Tieba about Fengxing TV after-sales service

In addition to self-entertainment and quality control, Fengxing also lies to users

If product defects are a cost game, but if companies start lying to users, it is more than just a moral flaw.

It is understood that Fengxing TV's 4K panel, which is an important selling point in its publicity, is suspected of deliberately concealing its true parameters.

For example, the 43-inch and 49-inch Fengxing TVs use LG's RGBW four-color hard screen, which actually takes advantage of the fact that China does not have a 4K standard. It is commonly known as a pseudo-4K screen in the industry.

The physical resolution of the RGBW panel is still 3840×2160, and the total number of pixels is also 8.3 million. However, the number of sub-pixels of the four colors of RGBW is 1/4 of 8.3 million respectively; while in traditional RGB 4K TVs, the total number of screen pixels is also 8.3 million, but the number of sub-pixels of each color is 1/3 of 8.3 million respectively. Therefore, RGBW is called pseudo-4K.

Not only that, after the arrival of Fengxing TV, many consumers were surprised to find that the Bluetooth module, Wi-Fi module, graphics processor, etc. were several levels lower than what was advertised at the Fengxing press conference.

As we all know, to support HDMI2.0 input of 4K 60Hz video, a platform of at least MSD828 is required. However, Fengxing, which uses MSD638, claimed to support 4K 60Hz at the press conference and on its official website. In other words, Fengxing TV, which claims to be a pioneer in the 4K era, is a pseudo-4K spokesperson from chips to panels.

Frequent changes in senior management also hurt shareholders

Over the years, Fengxing.com has gone through a series of changes from outside the system to inside the system and then back to outside the system, often giving people the illusion of being "marginalized."

Previously, Oriental Pearl, which was responsible for the transformation of Shanghai Media Group's new media business, had invested nearly 900 million yuan in Fengxing.com. Although it was once regarded as an industry benchmark by the outside world, the actual situation was not optimistic.

As for Fengxing.com, although it had a godfather of the "national generation", it still could not escape the cruel reality of consecutive years of losses. Instead, it was dubbed by the industry as "a time bomb hidden in Shanghai Media Group". Its position in the system became even more precarious, and it eventually sold part of Fengxing's shares to Zhaochi.

As the largest color TV ODM manufacturer in China, Shenzhen MTC Co., Ltd. raised 3.67 billion yuan last year for its Internet TV business projects. Now, the dismal sales volume may well indicate that this huge amount of money will be wasted.

On October 25 this year, Shenzhen MTC released its third quarterly report. The company achieved operating income of 5.147 billion yuan from January to September 2016, and net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 350 million yuan, down 19.01% year-on-year, which was bearish for the company's stock price. Shenzhen MTC stated that Beijing Fengxing was included in the scope of consolidated financial statements during the reporting period, and the performance declined due to the loss of Beijing Fengxing. Analysts believe that the risks facing Shenzhen MTC are that the capacity release and orders are insufficient, and the transformation speed and sales are lower than expected.

On December 10, 2015, at the Fengxing Chaowei TV product launch conference held in Shanghai, Luo Jiangchun made a public appearance as the CEO of Fengxing.com. However, as the founder, Luo Jiangchun had actually withdrawn from the actual affairs of Fengxing.com after Zhaochi completed the acquisition.

In March 2016, when Fengxing Vice Chairman Zhou Can was interviewed by the media, he was already the CEO of Fengxing.com. With the change of leadership, the company's product strategy also experienced a sharp turn of direction adjustment, from the initial "price butcher" to the later total negation of "not making low-priced Internet TV", it can be seen that Fengxing TV completely overturned its original brand positioning.

In June this year, Zhou Kun, a veteran in the color TV industry, joined Fengxing TV as a partner and served as CEO of Fengxing Multimedia. Facing the current severe situation in the industry, he said that low prices have no future. Low prices can only achieve a breakthrough at a certain point. If you want to succeed, you also need to take the high-quality route.

From Zhou Kun's words, we can see that Fengxing is opposed to the previous sales model of breaking the bottom price. Zhou Kun told the media that Fengxing will no longer make low-priced Internet TVs in the future, and his goal is to make Fengxing TV the best TV in China.

However, before Fengxing sets its sights on making the best television in China, it may have to first solve the problems of false advertising and misreporting sales.

After all, the best products are those that can withstand all-round testing by users. It is ineffective to only think about costs and publicity. I hope Fengxing can start from the interests of consumers and shareholders and truly have fewer routines and more sincerity.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.