It's been covered in many media outlets, though I haven't seen a thread on it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...s-2269717.html

Speaks volumes that Philips believe this is no longer a profitable line of business.

I'm guessing Philips are the last high volume Euro manufacturer in this market ? (B&O, Loewe are low volume, not sure Beko / Vestel count as European).

I thought tv sets were all made in Turkey or China now anyway? None of them last more than a few years. The sets on sale in supermarkets etc are so cheap and nasty now they make up a name to put on the front like neon or tecknika or something as they are so cheap even the cheap brands dont badge them!

This is a reflection of the dire state of the TV industry. Ten years ago it was the number #3 or #4 brand by value and volume in the UK. Sony was #1, Panasonic #2. In certain niche sectors - portable TV and TV combi - it was #1 or #2 depending on quarterly results.

Look at the figures today and it's the Koreans on top. Samsung #1, LG #2. They've beaten the Japanese at their own game.

Where we are headed is a world where mediocre quality is the norm because everything is sold on price. Very sad.

Agree that Philips have seen a massive decline in market share which the Koreans have taken.

Not sure I'd agree about the 'mediocre quality' comment though. I suspect that a brand new Samsung or LG LCD set is vastly better quality than a comparable (in market position terms) CRT from a mid-range manufacturer (Hitachi / Philips / Sharp) of 10 / 15 years ago.

If anything the quality (in terms of picture and sound) on the Korean sets seems to be far closer to Panasonic or Sony than anything the mid-range guys of 15 years ago ever produced.

Naw, 5 years ago you couldn't even buy a 1080p plasma at any affordable price, quality wasn't better, you just had less choice. For what you can get now at a reasonable price, it isn't junk. You can buy chinese junk if you want though, and that was the unprofitable segment of the business that philips chose to compete in. Now that yesterdays premium technology is now mid end and half the price, that market felt the pressure and philips snapped.

Well we have different views. IMO despite the technology improvements (resolution, colour gamut, scaling) picture quality hasn't improved to the same degree. Look at the huge strides that projectors have made in the same span of time. Now consider one of the major bugbears for someone changing from CRT to a flatscreen. Their SDTV performance goes down!

Some of that is for technical reasons, sure; but you still have to accept that SDTV looks nicer on an old tech TV than it does on the vast majority of flatscreens sold today.

You're focusing on features, resolution and price... but not quality.

If the cheap Chinese/Turkish TVs weren't profitable then the supermarkets wouldn't be in there so heavily. It's cut throat and volume driven, but that's something different. No, the less profitable TV sectors are further up the range. They are the places where manufacturers try to add value.

Samsung's CEO warned several years ago that the TV industry's direction was unsustainable; and he wasn't talking about this from other manufacturer's perspectives. That's why the brand has worked so hard to take the number one slot.

I think it has been as it always has, the folks that buy on price always have.

The samsung ceo is just complaining as they all do because the flat panel market changed the steady state of the crt into one of massive competition. They have to continuously invest in new technology/r&d/manufacturing to stay on top, whereas in the past with crt they stagnated fiddling with barely any change over decades. What is bad for them is good for us. We get low prices and far nicer tv's each year at affordable prices, they struggle, but that is fine, no one owes them a profit. I'm not worried, if they can't make a profit, they die, it works out in the end. No one is worried no one will be left to make flat panels in the future. The market is just shaking out the weak players is all..who have coasted for decades when crt required little work.

What you mean by the weak players is those that choose to make quality sets. Sorry most tvs made now are junk and are not nicer tvs! The way things are going we might see Panasonic and Sony pull out of the tv market because they seem to be the only decent brands left.

^^^ Here's a sensible voice

Pocatello, the Japanese idea of constantly improving quality and lowering costs is the one that the Koreans have adopted and outpaced their competitors with isn't a new idea. The thinking behind it was crystallised by an American statistician born in 1900 called W. Edwards Deming. In isolation his concepts are sound. But there's a problem, and it goes to the very heart of this situation of a downward spiral in cost at the expense of quality. The problem is this....

Someone has to be responsible for selling the quality achieved.

Without that, all that is left is to sell on price. This inevitably leads to a reduction in quality.

The motor industry also use Deming's teachings, but they realised very early on that quality alone isn't enough. If customers don't see, understand, and appreciate why one brand is more expensive than another then it's a wasted effort. They control the message about brand values very carefully.

The TV industry's channels to market are quite different to motor industry's of course. With the exception of the Sony and Panasonic solus centres TV retailing is a multi-brand operation. But then too is PC retailing... and Apple seem to have done quite well at differentiating their brand from the herd.

The fact is that with several seemingly similar TVs on a shelf and no real guidance why one is better or worse than the rest then the average consumer will choose the cheapest. That isn't a good purchasing decision. So in this case Darwinian principles based on price alone mean that the weakest survives at the expense of the strongest. Now you tell me, how is that good for consumers?

Sorry it doesn't add up, tv's have been sold in the retail channel for decades now, so either the quality was lost a long long time ago or your slippery slope argument holds no water.

Past consumers were no less price sensitive or more well educated about the products on sale. The case you are making just doesn't hold up to history.

At no time in history did everyone care about buying a high end tv set. People acted as they always have, some buy cheap, some buy premium, and the companies catered for these market segments. Only difference now is there is a greater rate of change and churn, and the customer has more options than before. If you looked at the past you see that there was little reason to upgrade, a tv was stagnant technology, any size increase was impractical for most people because of the inherent size and weight issues involved. If you look at inflation adjusted prices what the customer could buy was pretty little screen for the money regardless.

It is like saying old ibm pc's were higher quality, so what? I'm sure the case was high gauge steel perhaps, but for the price you paid back in the days of the 286 you could probably purchase 5 full pc's today. It is quality without meaning, if your fast modern desktop dies in 5 years and your 286 which you paid 5 times more for dies in 10 were you really getting more value with the 286?

Is it any wonder that Phillips have seen sales decline? During the last year they only sold sets with standard definition tuners instead of the new T2 (MPEG-4) hi-def tuners. Who would want to buy a Freeview set that could not get the main channels subscription free in hi-definition and pay a lot of money for it? The only good thing about them was that they looked smarter than most of the competition.

Are your comments and observations based on some inside industry knowledge, or just what you perceive as a consumer?

Yeah, Britons are obsessed with price and go for the cheapest possible, usually, concerning tv , and thats why we no longer have an Industry in them. Also our sets were crap compared with overseas makers which were very reliable for the same price. Very few people are bothered with technical details, the days of selling sets on that died a long time ago.
99.99% of people buy a tv because its cheap, on offer or free credit, regardless of make, and 99.99% of people lift it out of the box, switch it on and watch it for years exactly like that, no adjustments, just exactly as it switches on out of the box. I remember going to a home service on a stereo set that was 6 years old, and finding the sound was fully over on the right hand speaker. I adjusted it back to the middle and both L and R channels were playing- what a difference!--- and nobody in the household noticed. Thats how it had come on straight out of the box 6 years earlier. Thats how most viewers are. They cant see finer pictures, or a more natural colour balance, or adjustable bass/trreble etc..and most couldnt really give a toss.

Not at all, many UK designed and built sets were just as reliable as imported ones, and often far more so.

The industry failed simply because of too high manufacturing costs in the UK, plus a certain amount of total incompetence as well.

Nigel and I see the industry from the inside. He as a retailer, and me from the manufacturer's point of view.


I can empathise with your points of view but I disagree in several areas.

If Britain was totally obsessed with price then there wouldn't be any luxury brands at all. Clearly that's not the case. So there are some consumers that shop mainly on price, and there are others that weigh up value in a different way. It's always been like that, and I think it always will.

What's missing in retail is good salesmanship and service. The smaller independents were good at listening to their customers, then pointing them to products that best matched their needs. That rarely happens with the sheds. It's "close a deal regardless" with them.

If people didn't care about quality then forum sites like this wouldn't exist. People come here for advice because it's lacking on the high street. I see them asking the same sorts of questions... "Is this good?"...and getting the same sorts of answers...."X is better because...". Now if that isn't selling on technical details then what would you call it?

Where I would agree is that many consumers haven't the first clue about setting up picture and sound. But some of them find their way here and elsewhere to ask those sorts of questions too.

Sony sold the last of their European manufacturing and R&D facilities earlier this year.

We have a Samsung 50" plasma that we bought last August.
We have seen the same TV but now with 3D capability for £250 less than we paid.

The price drops are quite stunning

Now that I think of it, what I paid for my 50" plasma is what my family paid for a 27" crt in the 90s.

That's rather a misleading statement, presumably deliberately intended as such?.

The facilities are still doing the same as before, assembling Sony products, simply not physically owned by Sony any more.

The facility I'm most involved with has simply changed it's name (address and contact people are still the same) from:

Sony BCN Technology Centre

to:

Barcelona Clean Technologies Hub S.L

The situation is that Sony have sold 100% of their interests in the manufacturing plant and R&D facilities to local European companies. In contrast, Philips have formed a joint venture with a Hong Kong company so that they retain 30% ownership of their TV division.

PS I also note that Arcelik who use the brands Beko and Grundig (outside the UK and Australia) when not in Turkey, have a production plant in Romania (or at least their parent company Koc group do). Is that by any chance the Sony TV plant they sold earlier? I note that the Arcelik Turkey site appears to sell their own brand TVs and Sony ones, some of which bear a resemblance to the former.

BTW, Mr Koç did seem to have an unfortunate choice of company names

No, the Romanian factory makes fridges and Beko acquired it nine years ago:

http://www.appliancemagazine.com/new...e=2&first=2951

I don't even think Sony had a factory in Romania.

The 19BX and 22BX models are actually Beko sets badged by Sony, the first ever Sony TV's to be badged - so there's certainly a connection between Beko and Sony.

As 1andrew1 says, I don't think Sony had a factory in Romania?.

One issue I have with this argument is that 25 years ago the number of places selling av equipment were either much much smaller and/or the retailers themselves were far more involved with the servicing and repair of the items they sold. By being far more involved in the repairs/servicing the dealers would generally supply the brands that they believed would give them both good margins and also as little grief as poss' during the products lifespan. This meant that brands with bad reliability or poor customer service or bad spares availability were not stocked by these dealers. The dealers that did stock the items were the Argos's, Dixons, Powerhouse's, Tempo's etc.. of the time where people who wanted cheep stuff could find it but at the same time see the difference of quality on display.
Today there are a huge number of essentially faceless companys/individuals selling items on the web that have no obligation to provide the face-to-face service of old and simply rely on the manufacturers of the sets to do the repair work. This allows people to buy items based purley on "tech' spec's" and price without knowing the actual "quality" of the items in question, be that picture, sound or build.
I am always amused by the amount of people that come into our shop and say they have seen friends TV's, be they Samung, LG or similar, and are convinced that those brands are now THE brands on the market to beat for "quality". I am then equally amused when they see a Panasonic and realize how much better they are for not much more money.

I think you have to go back long past 25 years ago if you want to take repair into account, before the opening of china and the rise of the japanese electronic industry. Cheap imported tv's have been around for quite some time now, and people haven't been taking into account "repair" costs for a long long itme, only did back in the day when tv's both cost a fortune, and were practically expected to require service. The major factor was cost back then, what a tv cost when accounting for inflation was insane by todays standards, and it only gets worse the farther you go back.

http://www.tvhistory.tv/tv-prices.htm