The birth of TV for nearly a hundred years: making a big screen, cutting prices, but being abandoned by young people

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Text / Sun Pengyue

Source/Zinc Finance (ID: xincaijing)

Television, as the “four major items” in the traditional Chinese sense, is no longer in the limelight. Although each new product launched is larger than the other, the price has dropped all the way, and it has even been abandoned by young consumers.

On October 24, Vidda, a subsidiary of Hisense, the official sponsor of the 2022 World Cup, launched the “100-inch King” 100-inch IMAX cinema giant-screen TV Vidda Z100. It is reported that this giant-screen TV, which can be called a “super large cup”, is equipped with 256 backlight partitions, adopts matrix dynamic light control, the peak brightness reaches 1000nits, and the color gamut reaches 95% DCI-P3 color gamut coverage. It is △E≈0.87.

Vidda Z100, as the official designated TV for the 2022 World Cup, is priced at 16,888 yuan. But if you add in discounts, a 100-inch super-large-screen TV may cost about the same as the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Not only the Vidda Z100, but now the TVs on the market are getting bigger and bigger, but the price has not risen with the tide.

During the upcoming Double Eleven, 43-inch, 55-inch, and 65-inch Xiaomi TVs are only priced at 799 yuan, 1299 yuan, and 1799 yuan, which is on par with the mainstream models of Xiaomi’s sub-brand Redmi.

The TV that was born in 1925 is about to cross a century, but unfortunately, the market cannot wait to replace it.

Mobile phone brands impact traditional home appliances

No matter how big the TV is now, there is still an undeniable fact: the TV industry has not experienced technological iterations for nearly 20 years.

The last “technology war” in the TV industry can be traced back to around 2005 when LED LCD TVs and plasma PDP TVs competed for the market. In the end, LED LCD TVs won and occupied the entire market.

Then the entire TV industry began to lie flat, and all brands made minor repairs in the frame of LCD. It is nothing more than upgrading LED TVs to OLED TVs, the size has changed from 40 inches to 70 inches and 100 inches, and the resolution has changed from 1080P to 4K or 8K. There is no technical breakthrough.

Although there is no breakthrough in technology, traditional TV brands have ushered in the baptism of the Internet era.

In March 2013, LeTV and Foxconn jointly released a new brand “LeTV Super TV”, which sounded the horn for Internet brands to attack the TV market. In May, the X60, the first product of LeTV Super TV, was released, and the price was only 6,999 yuan, which was half of the price of similar products in China.

LeTV Super TV quickly surpassed a series of TV brands such as Konka, TCL and Changhong, and became the first echelon head player in the TV market. According to the report “Brand Share of China’s Color TV Overall Market”, the highest monthly sales volume of LeTV Super TV was 715,000 units, accounting for 21.83% of the total sales, ranking first in the industry and across all channels; in the distribution of brand share in China’s smart TV market , LeEco ranked first with 9.6%.

Leshi has made a good start as an Internet brand, and the mobile phone manufacturers of “small screen players” that are closest to smart TVs can’t wait to follow.

In September 2013, Xiaomi released the first generation of TV products and officially entered the color TV market. The first 47-inch 3D smart TV released by Xiaomi is positioned as “the first TV for young people”, with a price of 2,999 yuan. At that time, the price of about 50-inch TVs exceeded 4,000 yuan.

With the ultimate price-performance ratio, Xiaomi quickly gained recognition and support from consumers. Honor, Huawei, OPPO and other mobile phone brands have launched their own TVs, and the TV market has completely become the second growth business of mobile phone brands.

Compared with traditional color TV manufacturers such as Changhong, Konka and Skyworth, mobile phone manufacturers are more aware of the pain points of consumers. In an era when traditional TVs can only use “big screens” as a selling point, mobile phone manufacturers can talk about more things, from hardware configuration to intelligent ecology, using their own technical advantages and brand influence to create a home entertainment terminal platform.

According to data from Aowei Cloud Network, the average prices of 85-inch, 86-inch, and 98-inch products at the beginning of 2020 were 22,929 yuan, 22,622 yuan, and 179,057 yuan, which had dropped to 9,624 yuan, 7,899 yuan, and 19,815 yuan in April this year; , the price of 98-inch products has dropped nearly 10 times in two years.

Smartphone brands have distanced themselves from traditional color TV manufacturers not only in terms of sales, but have gradually lowered the overall price of TVs in price wars.

backstab projector

If the entry of mobile phone brands has taken away most of the TV market share, the emergence of smart projectors has caused consumers to start giving up TV little by little.

The TV, which has been born for nearly a hundred years, has already made new consumer groups feel aesthetic fatigue in the visual experience. It can be directly felt from the data that with the popularity of smartphones, in 2016, the boot rate of TVs in my country was still about 70%; by 2019, the boot rate was only a pitiful less than 30%.

TV sales are also declining. Data from Aowei Cloud Network shows that in the past three years, domestic TV sales were 48.94 million, 44.5 million, and 38.35 million, respectively. Last year, affected by price increases, the sales fell sharply by 13.8%, to nearly 10%. lowest in years.

At the same time, the emergence of smart projectors has brought a refreshing visual experience to consumers. Especially in the post-epidemic era, cinemas are often closed in large areas, and consumers need a big-screen viewing experience. The emergence of new home entertainment needs has further stimulated the market for smart projectors.

In the first half of 2022, a hot search for “electronic products that young people want to buy the most” caused heated discussions. Through interviews and surveys of 952 young respondents, we learned that smart projectors have become the TOP1 electronic products that young people want most. The user portraits of Tmall and JD.com show that the purchasers of smart projectors are very young, with more than 80% of buyers aged 26-45.

Building your own cinema at home has become a beautiful vision for the smart projectors of Gen Z consumers.

According to the “China Projector Market Tracking Report for the Fourth Quarter of 2021” released by IDC, the total shipments of China’s projector market in 2021 will be 4.7 million units; of which, the shipments of home projectors will be 3.48 million units, a year-on-year increase of 16%. Sales exceeded 12.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 18.3%; in addition, the report predicts that the compound growth rate of the projector market will still exceed 17% in 2026, and the sales volume of the Chinese projector market is expected to exceed 10 million units in 2026.

At the same time, policies are also encouraging smart projectors. In the first half of 2022, the “13th Five-Year Plan” for the development of the projector industry issued by the government clearly requires that the projector industry will increase its output and sales by 30%. Introduce supporting policies.

The product form of TV has undergone earth-shaking changes, and it is no longer limited to a display screen. Smart projectors are more like “frameless TVs” using TV solutions, with a larger and more free viewing experience, and are regarded by the market as the ultimate solution for “future TVs”.

Traditional TV is slowly being phased out.

Raw material cost reduction

The price war provoked by mobile phone brands, the gradual encroachment of smart projectors on the market, and the lack of market demand… All kinds of factors add up to make TVs cheaper and cheaper. All TV brands are forced to cut prices to drive sales growth. Save consumers with low prices.

Despite all the disadvantages, TV brands have ushered in a great advantage: the cost of raw materials has fallen.

It is understood that in traditional LCD TVs, the panel is the most important component in cost, accounting for 50-60% of the total cost. The price reduction of panel components can directly make TV prices drop a lot.

According to foreign media reports: the price of TV panel components has been falling for 14 consecutive months. Among them, the TFT55 type Open Cell (semi-finished product without backlight, etc.) was still priced at more than 100 US dollars per piece in May this year. The price dropped to $82; it even sold for $181 last October.

In addition to the relief of TV brands due to cost reductions, on July 29, 2022, 13 departments including the Ministry of Commerce issued the “Notice on Several Measures to Promote the Consumption of Green Smart Home Appliances”, increasing home appliance subsidies and trade-in policies to further encourage home appliances Update demand and market activity.

Although the TV market continues to shrink, the high-end market has seen rare growth in recent years. According to data released by Aowei Cloud, the overall domestic sales of color TVs will decline by 13.8% in 2021, but the sales of large-screen TVs have increased. Among them, the 65-inch market accounted for 21.8%, a year-on-year increase of 3.9%; the 75-inch market accounted for 7.4%, a year-on-year increase of 3.4%; the proportion of sizes above 80 inches also increased by 1.2% to 2%.

The price of TVs under 55 inches has been continuously lowered, and then the development of new products of giant-screen TVs over 80 inches has become a new strategy for TV players. At present, Xiaomi, Hisense, Skyworth, and TCL have all launched their own giant-screen TV products, many of which are “super super super cups” over 100 inches.

At a time when the TV market is becoming saturated, the lack of innovation has become a pain point for all brands, and they can only continue to rely on increasing the screen to reawaken consumers’ desire to shop. However, “big” alone cannot satisfy the appetite of consumers, and the market needs the emergence of “new”.

This article is reproduced from: https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/csj/2022-10-28/doc-imqmmthc2471635.shtml
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