c**i
发帖数: 6973 | 1 "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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