Judging from the data, China's color TV companies are not doing so well in 2022.
According to data released by Oviyun.com, the retail volume of China's color TV market in 2022 will be 36.34 million units, down 5.2% year-on-year, and the retail sales scale will be 112.3 billion yuan, down 12.9% year-on-year. In fact, China's color TV market has been declining for many years since it peaked in 2016, and the shrinking scale has also forced existing players to accelerate the pace of technology research and development, forcing the industry to produce a series of cutting-edge display technologies.
From the trend of 2022, Mini LED, 8K, ultra-large size panel, high refresh rate and other technical indicators have become the standard of high-end models, and even have a trend of decentralization to mid-range products. However, has this effort brought results? This set of latest market data may have more direct reference value.
According to data from Zhongyikang, in the first quarter of 2023, the market size of color TVs reached 8.48 million units, a year-on-year increase of 5.3%. For this achievement, the industry believes that this is a positive signal of the market recovery, and the color TV market, which has been sluggish for many years, has finally seen hope. At the same time, there is also "good news", that is, the characteristic selling points of the active layout of manufacturers have achieved unexpected results, and more consumers have indeed paid for them.
(Image source: Veer.com)
However, not all "selling points" have achieved the desired effect, and the "attraction" between them is indeed high and low.
8K+OLED, not so attractive
From the information compiled by Zhongyikang data, the attractiveness of different product selling points is obviously different, from which we can also glimpse the new trend of the TV market. From the data point of view, "Mini LED" and "high refresh rate" are the most popular product selling points in the online + offline market in the first quarter, which can attract consumers more than other product selling points; The display technology of "quantum dots" is also attractive, but the two display technologies of "8K" and "OLED" are insignificant in their attractiveness to the market.
(Image source: Zhongyikang Data)
In response to such data, the market signal has been very obvious: manufacturers with Mini LED and high refresh rate and quantum dot technology have more opportunities to seize opportunities in the future market. The two major technologies of 8K and OLED, manufacturers can put it first.
However, such a change in the situation seems to have traces, since 2020 "Mini LED" and high refresh rate screen has become the "tide" in the color TV industry, including TCL, Skyworth, Samsung, Konka and other TV manufacturers have launched their own Mini LED product line, and in technology research and development, product marketing and other links to pay attention to gold.
(Image source: TCL official website)
As a backlight technology, the arrival of Mini LED allows the screen to have higher screen brightness, higher contrast, better color display and lower power consumption, so that the display effect has a full range of improvement, intuitive experience advantages, I believe is the core reason why consumers favor Mini LED technology.
What is more rare is that the cost of the large-size Mini LED display used on TVs has decreased over the years, and has gradually fallen from the previous "tens of thousands of yuan" to "tens of thousands of yuan" or even "within 10,000 yuan", and the threshold for consumers to experience Mini LED technology has been reduced, and the attractiveness has naturally increased.
For example, when we search for "Mini LED TV" on an e-commerce platform, we can see that the price of medium-sized products of mainstream brands has come to around 5,000 yuan, and the cost performance is very prominent.
(Image source: JD.com)
In addition to Mini LED, another popular selling point of the product "quantum dot technology" is also directly related to picture quality, which can greatly improve the color gamut coverage, color control accuracy, red, green and blue color purity and other dimensions of the TV.
It is not difficult to see that for the category of TV, "visual stimulation" is still the core driving force to promote consumer consumption, although we say that the iterative progress of TV products has entered a bottleneck period, but consumers will still use their wallets to vote for products with better picture quality.
However, the "OLED" technology, which can also improve the picture quality, cannot attract consumers, which is related to the characteristics of OLED technology itself. Simply put, OLED display panels do have better display performance, but the disadvantages of high maintenance costs and short life on large-size equipment are amplified. In addition, the emergence of backlight technologies such as Mini LED makes non-OLED panels also have excellent display effects, which naturally makes OLED technology no longer blindly sought after.
As for 8K resolution technology, the data seems to speak for itself. In the current situation of imperfect content ecology and lack of 8K resources, consumers do not have much motivation to chase 8K resolution TVs, and the experience after upgrading to 8K TVs will not necessarily improve, or even decrease.
The main reason is that most of the film and television resources are now based on FHD resolution, and if you use 8K TV to play FHD content, it is inevitable that the picture will be stretched and the clarity will decrease. Of course, considering the high price of 8K TVs, the high experience threshold is also another important reason for consumers to "not be cold".
"Intelligence" that is gradually moving away
As audio-visual equipment, we can see that the first demand of consumers to buy TV is still picture quality, but from another point of view, does this indicate that the "intelligent wave" of the past few years has come to an end?
We believe that this may already be a fact.
It is undeniable that a few years ago, Huawei took the lead in launching "smart screen" products for the industry did kick off the prelude to intelligence, and then the vast majority of TV brands did carry out a more thorough intelligent transformation, but with the completion of the transformation, the head manufacturers did not take further action, but turned the focus back to the "picture quality" point.
The most interesting thing is that when Huawei now promotes its own "smart screen" products, it puts more space on "picture quality" than the "smart" selling point, and it seems that Huawei, the originator of "smart screen", also understands that selling TV or publicizing picture quality can better capture consumers.
(Image source: Huawei official website)
As for the reason, it is actually very simple, although the technology companies dominated by mobile phone manufacturers hope to build smart TVs into the so-called "home intelligence center", but in fact, the positioning of TV in the family has always been very clear, that is, "viewing tools".
As a movie-watching tool, the convenience of use brought by intelligence is important, but it is always the "icing on the cake". In addition, it is difficult for the evolution of experience intelligence to continue to bring too much improvement, as long as it reaches a certain baseline, it is enough to provide an experience above the average level.
Of course, more importantly, the wave of "Internet of Everything" set off by smartphone manufacturers is constantly cooling, and home appliances are not truly connected as a whole as manufacturers expect, or when they are really connected to a certain extent, the experience perception of the entire ecosystem cannot meet consumers' expectations.
For such reasons, the market recognizes that the intelligence of TV products at this stage can not really attract consumers, nor can it build product advantages in a short time, and intelligence has naturally become a "castle in the sky".
Xiaolei believes that intelligence may become a differentiated selling point of products when the hardware is extremely homogeneous and the viewing experience cannot bring more breakthroughs, relying on the operation experience of the system and the collaborative operation of multiple devices to attract consumers. But at least at this stage, "intelligence" can not become the "golden brand" of TV, the mainstream track of competition still revolves around the core selling point of "picture quality", and the competition between panel and display technology is still mainstream.
Is the recovery in sales a flash in the pan?
As mentioned earlier, TV sales in the Chinese market have been declining for many years, and with the "recovery" in the first quarter of 2023, everyone is more concerned about whether this will be a "flash in the pan". In the past three years of the epidemic, we have indeed seen many examples of "flash in the pan", such as the PC and tablet markets have picked up significantly in the past two years, but in the melody of returning to decline this year, no one knows whether the color TV industry has come out of the downward cycle, or is it really just a "flash in the pan".
Personally, I believe that from the long-term trend of the next three to five years, the color TV market will still appear in a repeated state of slow growth or negative growth, and it is unlikely that there will be significant growth, or "obvious recovery".
The main reason is that new TV products cannot bring a "revolutionary" movie-watching revolution, and in the original core appeal of "movie-watching", it is only the difference between "good and better". This means that consumers can get an experience that meets basic viewing needs even if they do not update their TVs, and consumers' willingness to switch is not obvious when TV products already have a high penetration rate.
(Image source: Veer.com)
In fact, we can see that from conventional panel technology to OLED, quantum dots and even today's popular Mini LED, the resolution from the past HD to FHD to QHD, the TV viewing experience has not completely changed, and with the continuous advancement of technology, the viewing experience has also appeared marginal effects.
The "smart TV" that individual manufacturers bet on is not as good as "from feature phones to smart phones" in terms of fundamental experience, and it is difficult to attract a large number of existing users to replace and upgrade existing TVs as a whole.
But at the same time, the market recovery in the first quarter also shows that the color TV market is not a pool of stagnant water, but there are still many opportunities in the segmented field. For example, as mentioned in this data, the new technology points with strong performance have successfully attracted new consumer groups with identifiable product advantages and brought significant sales growth.
For the entire color TV market, the increment has always been there, but it is a problem of more and less; For manufacturers, delving into image quality technology is still the focus of future development, although the direction of development and the different paths may lead to different results, but the general direction is not wrong.
However, for the color TV industry, it is still necessary to find a "super pain point" that can trigger market demand, and promote consumers to "have" to upgrade TV products to obtain a better experience. For the long supply chain industry of color TVs, the success of downstream products is inseparable from the support of the upstream industry chain, and I believe that this will still be a long process.