OPINION: This week, I went to TCL’s Spring Showcase in Paris to have a look at the company’s upcoming TVs, and unsurprisingly, there was a bullish confidence from them after a year that’s seen them grow.
When TCL first entered the UK market, it was mainly a TV brand hoping to make the best cheap TVs; the kind you’d see heavily discounted during sales. That, however, wasn’t the same as the TCL brand in the US, which seemed to have a much larger presence in the market.
Like a see-saw, the US and European markets have slowly aligned as the latter has grown in revenue and market share; and while the model names are different, the approach is similar, if not the same – it’s all about conquering the Mini LED TV market.
TCL doesn’t believe in OLED as much as other TV brands, and I suspect that’s because OLED is dominated by LG and now Samsung, two massive brands that are so entrenched in the market it’d be pointless to directly go up against them.
Instead, TCL has looked to Mini LED, which it believes carries more potential for HDR performance for the wider consumer market than OLED can.
Here are three reasons why TCL is confident that Mini LED can help it conquer the TV market.
It is all in on Mini LED
TCL’s messaging is simple: Mini LED, Mini LED, Mini LED with some more Mini LED.
Do you want something else? No, you’re getting Mini LED.
OLED? Go away.
8K? Who cares.
Mini LED is not the hill TCL is looking to die on, it’s the vantage point it intends to snipe the competition from.
The entire UK range that I saw at its Paris event was Mini LED from the entry-level 55C6K (£799) to the 65C8K (£1299), and while Mini LED has weaknesses (blooming and wide angles), TCL seemed confident that it could nullify these issues to the extent they wouldn’t hurt the viewing experience.
Time will tell, but with the next point, performance might not even really matter when you’re less expensive.
TCL is more affordable
In Europe at least, Mini LED and OLED were once both viewed as premium technologies. But that’s becoming less the case year by year, and much of that is down to TCL.
In the US, TCL drove the prices of Mini LED TVs down to affordable levels; allowing it to snatch market share in that part of the world. It’s performing a similar trick in Europe, with its growth rate in the Mini LED TV market up by 200%. That’s likely down to its relative affordability compared to other brands.
By making it more affordable it is more than likely squeezing its own profit margins, but at least in Europe revenue did go up, and if it succeeds in becoming one of the market leaders by snatching up customers at a lower price, it can upsell them a more expensive model; or through brand loyalty pitch them a similarly inexpensive TV.
It’s all about converting and keeping customers with attractive prices and experiences. The more customers you have, the less your rivals do, after all.
They are driving the market at bigger sizes
I’m a little confused between Hisense, TCL and Samsung; they’re all claiming to be the no.1 in large screen TV sales; so while I can’t see the trees for the forest at the moment, no one has been more aggressive than TCL in this area.
We’ve reviewed several of the company’s big screen models, and the prices are scarcely believable.
The most recent was the TCL 98Q9BK, which even at its original RRP of £3249, would have been fairly affordable for a TV of its size. It’s now dropped to £1999, which by way of comparison, is far less than a 65-inch Samsung S95F OLED (£3399 / $3399) and the 65-inch Sony Bravia 9 (£2799 / $3000).
Do you get the same level of performance as those TVs? Arguably not, but if you’re after king-sized TVs at an affordable price, no one is doing it as brazenly as TCL. It showed a 115-inch at the event (£12,999), sizes that are beyond what OLED and almost half as expensive as a 97-inch OLED (a 97-inch LG G4 is £24,999).
Regardless of whether the TV is better or not, from a perception of value, who’d be abel to argue convincingly against TCL’s approach?
The future is looking brighter for TCL
You could ask the question of how long this aggressive pricing could last, but that seems a question for another day as far as TCL is concerned.
While other TV brands such as Sony, Samsung, and LG haven’t fully vacated the less expensive area of the TV market, they are less vocal about it than they are about their premium TVs, and TCL, along with Hisense, is filling in that void.
You’d have noticed TCL and Hisense at sports events, and that’s another way in which they’re getting their names out to the public. TCL is no longer an upstart, it’s slowly but surely becoming one of the big boys and influencing the direction the market is going in, which means it’s starting to dictate what people want, whether the likes of Samsung like it or not.
And you can sense that a company such as Samsung is waking up to TCL as a threat. It used to be that at behind-the-scenes events, I’d see a Samsung TV up against an LG or a Sony; and while that’s still the case, at the last event in Frankfurt, there were more demonstrations of Samsung versus TCL.
Samsung has clapped its eyes on TCL, and for TCL there could be no better confirmation that it is a serious rival.
