Looking at the decline of Japan's television industry, can China become the next South Korea?

China has always had an awkward position in the global TV market. Although domestic TVs have more than half of the market share in China, they have never been able to make a breakthrough in foreign markets. International giants such as Samsung, LG, Sony, and Sharp have long controlled the TV industry and divided up more than half of the global market.

Among the manufacturers ranked top in comprehensive strength in the current TV industry, South Korean companies Samsung and LG are firmly in the first and second spots, while Sony and Sharp have been mired in losses. Following them are a number of domestic TV manufacturers relying on the rapidly growing Chinese market.

However, if we go back more than ten years, the landscape of the television industry was completely different from what it is now. At that time, the home appliance industry was still dominated by Japan.

The era when Korea was Japan's junior in the television industry

After World War II, Japan was in ruins and its domestic strategy at the time was to develop high value-added industries with the whole country's strength. After years of hard work, the support of the Japanese government, the help of the United States, and the stubborn character of the Japanese, Japan's technological strength has been recognized worldwide. In particular, the three major industries of shipping (after all, it is an island country), automobiles, and home appliances have become the economic pillars of Japan with world-leading technological strength and management models.

At that time, South Korea had just emerged from the tyranny of dictatorship. The first batch of television products launched by South Korea's LG (then called Venus Corporation) and Samsung in the 1960s and 1970s were based on the technology and components imported from Japan's Hitachi and Sanyo, respectively, and they were almost completely blank in terms of core technology.

Before the 21st century, in the era of CRT, it can be said that the core technology of the television industry was all in the hands of Japanese companies. A few months ago, Time magazine released a list of the "50 most influential electronic devices of all time", and Sony's Trinitron TV ranked second only to the iPhone that changed the world, which shows the glory of Sony's CRT TV.

How did Japan fall from its pedestal?

In the CRT era, Japanese televisions have firmly grasped the global market. Manufacturers such as Hitachi, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sanyo, Sharp, and Sony have won the hearts of consumers around the world with their attitude of striving for excellence and their willingness to spend any amount of money on research and development.

Sony is most praised for its Trinitron, Guixiang Engine and other technologies as well as its unrivaled industrial design capabilities. Sony's pursuit of picture quality is even more impressive. Its TV production technology is too advanced, resulting in a yield rate of only 0.2-0.3% on the production line. However, due to its outstanding picture quality, Sony still insists on improving while producing.

It was the Japanese companies' stringent requirements for their own products that pushed Japanese TV products to the top. But it was also this spirit that destroyed the Japanese companies' path to dominance during the market transformation.

At the end of the last century, after more than a hundred years of development, LCD technology finally came to fruition. However, except for Sharp, all Japanese companies were dismissive of LCD technology. Sony believed that the display effect of LCD was much inferior to its own CRT and was completely inconsistent with its pursuit of perfection; Panasonic took the wrong path and went further and further down the PDP path.

At this time, Samsung and LG of South Korea took the right path. The two companies immediately realized the huge potential of LCD technology and began to invest in research and development with the strong support of the South Korean government. At that time, the display effect of LCD was not as good as CRT, but the cost was much lower. From the economic recession in Japan in the late 1990s to the global economic crisis, people's requirements for quality became lower and lower, but they became more and more sensitive to price.

The spring of the Korean TV industry and the decline of the Japanese industry are inseparable from the exchange rate of their own currencies. For many years, the exchange rate of the Korean won has continued to fall, while the exchange rate of the Japanese yen has continued to rise, which has resulted in discounts and price increases for Korean and Japanese products when they are exported overseas. The positive and negative factors have led to a huge price difference between the two countries' TVs. Since the beginning of this century, Korean TV companies have been making high profits, while Japanese TV companies have started a marathon of losses that has lasted for more than a decade.

Japanese culture has destined Japanese companies to be good at starting businesses rather than maintaining their status quo. After Panasonic made a wrong bet on PDP, it has basically disappeared from the sight of consumers; Sharp is revered as the father of LCD, but it was slow to respond to LED and OLED technology, its product pricing was outrageous, its chip design capabilities were lacking, and it was unwise to reject Sony's request for a strong alliance; after Sony was left behind by LCD technology and spent huge R&D costs in the process of catching up, its panel manufacturing capabilities were unable to catch up with Samsung, LG and other Korean companies. Finally, after Sharp extended an olive branch but was rejected, its dream of the strongest panel + the strongest chip was shattered, and it could only be led by Samsung in terms of panel supply.

In this way, in the last round of competition in the television industry, Japanese companies were ultimately defeated, while Korean companies successfully surpassed them.

Current status of China's TV market

Chinese TV manufacturers used to be in the same situation as South Korea, with a serious lack of core technology and no brand recognition overseas. However, during the last CRT to LCD transition, although they did not make a comeback like Samsung and LG, they did accumulate some technology.

In the era of LCD TVs, domestic TV manufacturers such as TCL, Hisense, Skyworth, and Changhong have taken advantage of China's rapid economic development. As China's urbanization pace accelerates and the real estate industry develops rapidly, TVs, as a home entertainment appliance, are in rigid demand and sales continue to set new records.

The backwardness of independently developed chips, display modules, and LCD panel technologies has resulted in low quality of domestic television products and insufficient brand premium, making it difficult for them to escape the label of being low-end. However, at the same time, cheap domestic panels have also become the choice of low-end models of major manufacturers such as Sony and Philips.

As Chinese TV companies open up overseas markets with their price advantages and rely on the huge Chinese population to create domestic sales, domestic TVs have successfully surpassed Japanese brands such as Sony and Sharp. In 2013, the global shipments of domestic TV brand Hisense reached US$3.36 billion, successfully ranking among the top three in the world, second only to Samsung and LG, indicating that domestic TV companies are about to take off.

In this new era where challenges and opportunities coexist, what can we learn from the core changes in Japan and South Korea?

With the advent of the Internet era, new things emerge in an endless stream. While we created the Internet, we are also profoundly transformed by it. In the tide of the Internet, the role of television in our lives has also quietly changed.

Televisions, which used to only be able to passively receive content, now have the right to choose content after being connected to the Internet. At the same time, with the trend of smart phones and home appliances, televisions have become the most suitable core equipment for smart homes because they are a must-have in every household and have a long stable life cycle.

At the same time, the trend of TV intelligence is becoming more and more obvious as the online video industry matures. In the process of TV intelligence, unlike Sony, Samsung and other international manufacturers with rich production lines, difficulty in turning around, and slow response to market changes, Xiaomi, LeTV and other manufacturers have taken advantage of zero burden, high starting point and outstanding marketing skills to cross-border robbery.

During the last handover of the TV industry center between Japan and South Korea, South Korean manufacturers, despite being inferior to Japan in display technology, quickly seized the global market share by relying on their keen business sense for LCD technology, the economic policy support of the South Korean government, and low prices. However, due to a series of strategic mistakes, such as Sony's obsession with CRT and heavy investment in 3D technology, Sharp's slowness and wrong market positioning in LED and OLED technology, and Panasonic's obsession with plasma PDP technology, these Japanese companies have been unable to recover in the TV market.

Although there are many voices in the industry criticizing the low premium ability of domestic TV brands, blindly engaging in price competition, and pessimistically believing that domestic TVs will follow the old path of domestic mobile phones with homogeneous products, I think this boring voice can be stopped. On the surface, domestic TVs lack technical strength in the field of LCD TVs, and are only relying on excellent Internet functions and low prices to compete. In fact, domestic brands have relied on price advantages to grab a certain market share in the world. At the same time, each manufacturer is also accumulating its own technical strength, just like Samsung and LG 20 years ago.

TCL's quantum dot technology with 100% color gamut coverage; Hisense's low-cost, large-size ultra-short-throw DLP laser projection technology; LeTV's ecological layout and Skyworth's big content functions based on big data are all the technological accumulation and strategic deployment of Chinese TV manufacturers for the future development direction of the TV industry.

In the future, TV will be the core of smart home and the entrance of living room traffic, and its status is very important. In the past, this field belonged to Japan, and now it belongs to South Korea, but I believe that in the future, it will definitely belong to China, and to the bold and enterprising Chinese TV manufacturers. China is ready.

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.