Industry pundit Pete Putman weighed on the recent OEM agreement between TCL and Sony:
Well, I predicted this would happen...over 15 years ago. As the Japanese TV market slowly collapsed, egged on by the Great Recession, once-famous brands like Panasonic, Pioneer, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, and JVC either (a) stopped manufacturing TVs altogether and left the business, (b) OEM'ed televisions from Korean manufacturers (Samsung, LG) and Chinese manufacturers (TCL, Hisense, et al) and "private labeled" them, or (c) Washed their hands of the manufacturing end, but licensed their brands to Korean and Chinese manufacturers.
Profit margins on televisions plummeted over the past decade.
Both Samsung and LG were getting ready to shut down their LCD panel manufacturing facilities before the pandemic, but a surge in demand for everything from TVs to laptops and tablets kept those fabs open. Now, even the Korean giants shop in China for wholesale LCD panels and even finished TVs, with only LG's WRGB OLED fabs and Samsung's RGB OLED materials manufacturing still in operation.
Profit margins on televisions plummeted over the past decade.
Sony bragged for decades that they manufactured everything in the television chain, from cameras to TV screens. But even Sony was shopping for panels in the Chinese wholesale marketplace like everyone else. And their market share continues to slide year-over-year, with Samsung, TCL, Hisense, and LG together commanding over 90% of worldwide TV shipments.
Considering that 65-inch LCD panels for televisions can be bought for about $100 apiece (or less!) on the wholesale market (and TCL is one of the largest LCD panel manufacturers)—and you can buy an 4K 85-inch LCD TV for about $700 at BJ's and Costco—this deal was probably inevitable. Sony is slowly getting out of a lot of hardware businesses like laptops and audio gear. (They still are, by far, the world's biggest manufacturer of camera sensors, a very profitable business.)
The Bravia TV business was losing money 15 years ago and was spun off into a separate company from Sony Corporation because of that. I would not be surprised to see Sony eventually exit the TV manufacturing biz entirely, along with consumer audio, and just license their brand to a OEM company, like Hitachi, Toshiba, and JVC have done.
It's hard for some Japanese companies to admit when they've lost, but that's just the brutal economics of the TV biz nowadays. (And to think that 45+ years ago, we were still building and selling televisions in the U.S.!)
