TCL + Apple

choi

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"Amid generally gloomy data last week from Chinese manufacturers, there was a small ray of sunshine from TCL Corp, the consumer electronics maker. TCLs Shenzhen-listed flagship said on Friday that its profit for the first nine months would more than quadruple from a year earlier. Good going. But if normal market forces applied, TCL might not be around at all. In 2003, the Guangdong-based company, 25%-owned by the municipality of Huizhou, displaced Sony as the worlds biggest TV maker when it relieved Thomson, the French conglomerate, of its cathode ray tube TV business. It then bought the mobile handset business of Alcatel. As noted by Dragonomics losses from the enlarged TV and handset operations exceeded Rmb4 billion ($627 million) in the first three years after the deals nearly triple TCLs combined profits in the three years before them. Those losses should have forced it into a sale to a competitor, or at least a big restructuring. TCL had been built by support from the local government, so it was saved by it. Discounted land, tax breaks and cheap loans kept the company ticking over, preventing it and others from achieving optimum margins and economies of scale."
TCL: restricted channels. Financial Times, Oct 4, 2011

My comment:
(a) This piece appeared in the Lex column, which requires subscription to read online.
(b) Huizhou  广东省 惠州市
(c) The essay stated TCL in 2003 "displaced Sony as the worlds biggest TV maker when it relieved Thomson, the French conglomerate, of its cathode ray tube TV business."

Technicolor SA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor_SA
(formerly Thomson SA; section 1.2 Exiting the consumer business)
(d) The essay referred to a Dragonomics report:

Yuxin He, What TCL’s Foreign Foray Says About China Inc Going Global. Financial Times,
Nov 3, 2009 (blog).  
http://blogs.ft.com/dragonbeat/2009/11/03/what-tcls-foreign-foray-says-about-china-inc-going-global
("TCL was one of the biggest TV companies in the world’s biggest and fastest-growing TV market, and yet it made a disastrous bet on old-fashioned cathode-ray televisions just two years before the entire world, including its own home market, shifted en masse to flat-panel screens.")
(e) I finally learn why TCL has disappeared from the news.


--------------------------------Separately
(1) Apple's New Victim. Reuters, Oct 5, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/business/the-downside-to-a-debt-jubilee-breakingviews.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=reuters%20apple&st=cse

My comment:
(a) Breakingviews is a daily column at page 2 of Business section of New York Times.   
(b) It is the second piece in yesterday's column. In other words, the piece was published prior to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' death.
(c) I have never used a cellphone--not to mention a smartphone. But it seems to me that these victims were felled by computing machines--Apple had led the way of course--that are smaller and more powerful by the day.

(2) Lorraine Luk, TSMC CEO: Steve Jobs Changed The Face of Computing. Dow Jones Newswires, Oct 6, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20111006-700211.html


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