vizio lcd panel supplier made in china
Vizio has five distinct product categories in its 2021 TV lineup. Listed below are each of these categories, what to expect from each level, and the top offerings from that series.
This category focuses on dependability and value while providing the base Vizio experience with 21”- 40” displays. One of the most popular TVs in the D-Series category [1] is the Vizio D40F-G9. It has a 40-inch LCD display with a Full HD 1080p resolution. It comes equipped with its SmartCast OS for streaming and casting and is compatible with Google Assistant, Apple Siri, or Amazon Alexa.
V for value, this category offers an entry-level HDR experience, larger 40”-75” displays, and up to 4K resolution. One of the best examples is the Vizio V505-H19. It sports a 50” 4K resolution display with HDR compatibility, SmartCast, and full-array backlight dimming. It’s easily one of the most value-packed products in their lineup.
M for mid-range, Vizio brings in their more premium options such as Quantum LED, higher contrast for HDR10 and Dolby Vision certification, and HDMI 2.1 with variable refresh rate for gaming, more screen size options, with all the features mentioned above. The Vizio M65Q7-H1 is a crowd favorite, sporting a 65” 4K HDR QLED display with support for 4K 60Hz.
P for premium, this is where Vizio brings out their best with up to 85” in display size, a panel with higher brightness and contrast, and a refined full-array dimming experience. Vizio’s P65Q9-H1 can offer all that and is among the top favorites.
This is an odd category that doesn’t fall under Vizio’s letter-based naming. Despite that, Vizio shows its mastery over the OLED display. Although having smaller screen size options of 55”-65”, the use of OLED gives models in this series a visual experience unmatched by non-OLED displays. The OLED55-H1 is their most popular option, as it offers the glory of a 55” 4K HDR10+ OLED display with a variable refresh rate for gaming.
Here’s what you should know if you’ve decided to buy a TV and noticed the Vizio brand. Vizio is registered in the United States and owns the Vizio brand. It is one of the largest TV companies in the North American market. But while Vizio claims to be an American TV sales company, it operates as a sales and service company. Third-party manufacturers, OEMs, and ODMs manufacture all televisions on behalf of Vizio. Vizio itself does not have its factories. However, according to statistics provided by statista.com, Vizio was the third-largest TV supplier in the U.S. in 2020, with a 13 percent share of the TV market. Since 2017, however, Vizio has lost more than half of the TV market to other manufacturers. Vizio’s main competitor is China’s TCL, actively capturing North American market share.
According to the Chinese website https://baike.baidu.com/item/Vizio, the primary owners of Vizio, in addition to its founders, are China AmTRAN Technology Co Ltd, a manufacturer of ODM and OEM TVs, also has display factories, owns 23% of the shares. Another Vizio shareholder, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Ltd (Foxconn brand name), holds about 8% of the shares through its companies, source www.ledinside.com. The investment in the companies has made it possible to guarantee the supply of components and production of Vizio TVs at the technological sites of these companies.
Where is Vizio made: Vizio TVs are mainly assembled in China and Mexico. The leading supplier of TVs is AmTRAN; about half of Vizio’s TVs are manufactured in the company’s factories in China. TVs for Vizio are also assembled and supplied by Foxconn, which has assembly plants in Mexico. Other companies may also manufacture some TV models. You should know that all Vizio products are completely developed and manufactured in China, or components are manufactured in China and assembled in Mexico. At first glance, there’s nothing unusual about that; OEMs make the same iPhone. But there are some nuances for Vizio, which I will explain further below.
AmTran Technology Ltd manufactures Vizio TVs in China. It is a Taiwanese company with component manufacturing and assembly plants located in Raken, Suzhou, China.
AmTran offers its customers the development of TV sets (ODM), which means that the company develops new models of TV sets by itself, taking into account the wishes of the customer. Produced TV sets are delivered to the customer under the Vizio brand. It should be noted that AmTram is the leading supplier of TV sets for Vizio.
TV assembly plants in Tijuana, Mexico, assemble TVs from off-the-shelf components. Some Vizio televisions are made in Mexico and are manufactured by Foxconn in their plant.
You have to understand the following, Vizio is mostly budget TVs, the company has a very aggressive pricing policy, and you go into a store and see a Vizio TV for $398 and a Samsung next to it for $577. You might think, oh, I’ll save almost $200. But there’s no such thing as the same TV class being priced so differently. It’s all about the components. The Vizio has a cheaper display, look at the thickness of the TV, and you’ll understand.
Vizio TVs are designed in California, but they are made in Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Thailand and Mexico. That’s because Vizio outsources manufacturing to companies like BOE, Foxconn, Innolux, KIE, Tonly, TPV and Zylux. These manufacturers purchase the necessary components and assemble Vizio Smart TVs within their respective facilities.
Every Vizio TV is designed with two things in mind: customer experience and cost. That’s because Vizio’s entire brand was built around creating affordable, quality TVs using the latest and greatest technologies.
It’s important to note that “design” at Vizio is really just about how to best put parts together, affordably. Vizio did not develop nearly any of the technology they incorporate into their TVs.
Instead, they depend on non-exclusive license rights from third parties for these technologies. Vizio does not own most of the IP (intellectual property).
As mentioned, Vizio does not have any internal manufacturing or testing facilities/capabilities of their own – they rely 100% on third-party manufacturers to build, assemble, test and package their TVs.
The majority of Vizio TVs are made by 7 manufacturing companies – BOE, Foxconn, Innolux, KIE, Tonly, TPV and Zylux. These companies are located primarily in Asia – Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Thailand and Mexico.
Vizio relies heavily on these manufacturers to manage the prices paid for nearly all of the components found in their TVs– LCD & OLED panels, glass substrates, liquid crystal material, driver integrated circuits, polarizers, color filters, chipsets etc.
Once the manufacturers finish buying all the parts, building, and testing a batch of Vizio TVs, they are then responsible for shipping those finished products to the United States, where they are ultimately sold.
By selling into mostly large retailers, Vizio has been able to keep their costs and overhead quite low, which has translated to a more affordable consumer price tag.
While Vizio TVs are designed in the United States, they are actually made in several different countries: Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Thailand and Mexico.
Additionally, Vizio doesn’t own the majority of the technology in their TVs. Instead, they have non-exclusive licensing deals with the various owners of the IP.
Once the manufacturers finish making the TVs, they ship them to the US where Vizio sells them at retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, Sam’s Club, Target and Walmart.
No, Vizio is its own brand. Headquartered out of Irvine, Califnornia Vizio outsources manufacturing to companies like BOE, Foxconn, Innolux, KIE, Tonly, TPV and Zylux.
Yes, Vizio is a great TV brand. Vizio arguably offers the best “value” TVs on the market today. They make TVs with great quality pictures at affordable prices.
If you do a search for an economical TV brand that has modern specifications, there is a good possibility that the first TV brand that you come across will be Vizio.
But before you go out and spend your hard-earned money on a new television, you should probably find out who makes Vizio TVs and where they are manufactured.
Televisions manufactured by Vizio are designed in California, but production takes place in other countries including Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Mexico. The reason for this is that Vizio contracts its manufacturing work out to other businesses such as BOE, Innolux, Foxconn, TPV, Zulux, KIW, and Tonly. These manufacturers procure the necessary parts and assemble Vizio Smart TVs within their own facilities using components that they have purchased.
Vizio, in contrast to its rivals, has made the decision to outsource its labor and production to third-party OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and ODMs (original device manufacturers), which has resulted in a reduction in their overall costs.
Since these firms manage the entire production process, it enables Vizio to concentrate more of their efforts on research and development for their televisions and software, which results in
Yes. Despite having a unique approach to doing business, the company is officially registered in the United States. Vizio’s products are manufactured in Asia, despite the fact that the company’s primary market is located in North America.
William Wang, a Chinese American who was born in Taiwan, established the company Vizio in 2002 in California, the United States. Vizio is an American company.
Although some individuals are under the impression that Sony produces Vizio products, this is not the case. Both Vizio and Sony are their own distinct companies that compete with one another.
No, Samsung does not produce televisions under the Vizio brand. Vizio is an independent company that partners with AmTran Technology in Taiwan to produce its televisions. AmTran Technology is based in Taiwan.
Vizio is not a sub brand of any other company. Manufacturing is contracted out to third-party organizations such as BOE, Foxconn, Innolux, KIE, Tonly, TPV, and Zylux by Vizio, which has its headquarters in Irvine, California.
The United States of America is responsible for the design of Vizio televisions; however, the actual manufacturing of these televisions takes place in a number of different countries, including Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Mexico.
In addition, the lion’s share of the technology found in Vizio TVs is not owned by the company itself. Instead, they have licensing agreements that are not exclusive with the associated enterprises of the intellectual property.
Once production of the TVs is complete, the manufacturers send the devices to the United States, where Vizio distributes them to various big box retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart.
To put everything into perspective, over 80 million televisions have been sold by Vizio to this day, and the company is now worth close to $3.5 billion.
Vizio is an American company based in Irvine, California, but Vizio TVs are made by AmTran Technology in Taiwan and Foxconn in Mexico. Smaller Vizio TVs are made in China.
Vizio heavily relies on these manufacturers to make components for their high-quality TVs, including LCD and OLED panels, polarizers, circuit boards, chipsets, etc.
For the budget segment and in some mid-range cases, Vizio would be the better option as its TVs offer more features than Sony at the same price point.
Vizio Inc. (stylized as VIZIO) is an American publicly traded company that designs and sells televisions, sound bars, viewer data, and advertising. The company was founded in 2002 and is based in Irvine, California.
On October 19, 2010, Vizio signed a 4-year contract to sponsor U.S. college football"s annual Rose Bowl game in Pasadena, California, beginning with the 2011 Rose Bowl and ending with the 2014 Vizio BCS National Championship Game.Fiesta Bowl making the official name the Vizio Fiesta Bowl.
In November 2015, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Office of the New Jersey Attorney General brought charges against Vizio, alleging it collected non-personal information on its customers and sold it to advertisers.
Vizio produces television sets and soundbars and has previously produced tablets, mobile phones and computers. Vizio manufactures its products in Mexico, China, and Vietnam under agreements with ODM assemblers in those countries.
Television sets are Vizio"s primary product category, and in 2007 the company became the largest LCD TV seller (by volume) in North America.plasma televisions and would focus on the LED-backlit LCD displays .
In March 2016, Vizio announced the release of SmartCast TVs that allowed users to control the screen from a tablet or mobile app.Amazon Prime Video and Netflix.Google Assistant and Alexa-enabled devices, Apple Airplay2, Apple HomeKit
SmartCast is the operating system/platform that Vizio uses in all their smart TVs.Chromecast and Apple AirPlay.Apple TV+, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix and Prime Video.
Vizio has previously produced other products in addition to televisions and soundbars. In 2011, Vizio introduced the Via Tablet and Via Phone, its first tablet and mobile phone products.Android smartphones in Asian markets, including China,Google TV digital media player.
On October 19, 2021, Software Freedom Conservancy filed a lawsuit against Vizio Inc. because the company failed to fulfill the requirements of the GNU General Public License by failing to provide the source code. Software Freedom Conservancy states in the lawsuit that Vizio is "not providing and technical information that copyleft licenses require, Vizio was not even informing its customers about copylefted software and the rights it gives them as consumers."Federal District Judge Josephine Staton sided with Software Freedom Conservancy and granted a motion to send the lawsuit back to Superior Court, to answer breach-of-contract claims.
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A few weeks ago my housemates and I decided to pitch in for a new TV. We did our share of research and decided on a 37” LCD Vizio HDTV. The fact that Vizio is an American-based company was the “icing on the cake” if you will.
A day or two after purchasing the T.V. online I noticed that Woot.com was doing a mass-sale of the refurbished version of the Vizio we had just ordered. I was a little disheartened since they were going for $200 less than what we paid but I stomached the loss believing that ours would be a brand-new, long-lasting product with no need for a warranty (it does have one).
After some additional research on Vizio, I found that even though Vizio is based in Irvine, CA, as of 2007 they only employed 85 people in the States (that includes tech support to the Board members)!!! That’s a staggeringly low figure considering they were, and still are, the largest seller of HDTVs in the U.S. All of Vizio’s manufacturing and assembly is done by the cheapest of the cheap in China and they always, always contract their work out to the lowest bidder.
After calling one of Vizio’s 85 employees and hearing how “strange” it was that my TV broke the first week (he probably expected it make it to Week 3), this guy told me that they would send a technician out to fix it……..in about 3 weeks. I guess they have to manufacture and import their technicians from China too.
Chinese electronics firm LeEco is buying American TV manufacturer Vizio for $2 billion. The acquisition was announced during a press event this morning in Los Angeles, giving LeEco an instant foothold in the US television market. Under the deal, Vizio will be operated as an independent subsidiary, with the company"s current executive team staying in place and working out of its offices in Southern California — sans Vizio founder and CEO William Wang, who is leaving the company. No replacement has been named, but Wang will be taking the reins as chairman and CEO of Inscape, Vizio"s data business, which is being spun out into a privately held company. LeEco will own 49 percent of Inscape, with Wang owning the remaining 51 percent. The LeEco deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.
In what seemed to be more of a eulogy than a press conference, Wang described the company"s humble beginnings, and how it had fought through early challenges, parts shortages, and the global financial crisis as it slowly slugged its way to success. "We had to fight through competition from all over the world," he said, before lauding most of Vizio"s senior leadership team one by one.
"I have mixed feelings," he admitted about the deal. "As the owner and father of Vizio, I am very reluctant to let it go. But as the CEO and owner of the company, I know this is the right decision to make for our hard-working employees and loyal shareholders."
Vizio, on the other hand, has styled itself as an American success story. In 2012, all but three of the company"s 417 employees worked in the US, and its quiet and steady presence let it become a major player in the television space. But the company faced some criticism last year when it was discovered that its smart televisions were collecting information about user viewing habits — data that it was then sharing as part of its Inscape business. As part of the acquisition agreement, the LeEco-owned Vizio will continue to license Inscape"s technology for 10 years for use in its televisions, and will also be keeping all of Vizio"s current distribution agreements in place, giving it immediate reach into the US market. In fact, according to LeEco the acquisition will make it the "largest internet TV access point" in the world.
With the domestic market approaching saturation, branded Chinese LCD TV vendors see overseas expansion as the only means to grow their market shares and raise their brand recognition. The latest example of this approach is the acquisition of the U.S.-based consumer electronics maker VIZIO by LeEco, a rising Internet brand in the Chinese LCD TV market. Reports of VIZIO being up for sale gained traction after Foxconn’s acquisition of Sharp, and the US $2 billion deal with LeEco was finally announced on July 27.
Following the acquisition, the combined shipments of LCD TV sets from LeEco and VIZIO will reach 14.57 million units this year, according to WitsView, a division of TrendForce. In the annual global shipment ranking, LeEco will become one of the top five vendors and surpass compatriot brands Hisense and TCL to take the third spot. On the whole, this deal has significantly altered the competitive landscape of the global LCD TV market.
In addition to being known for offering LCD TVs with high cost-performance ratios, LeEco has further differentiated itself from competitors by selling subscriptions to its Internet TV channels. As most of its revenue comes from streaming video subscribers, LeEco intends to use the VIZIO brand to enter the North American market and replicate its business model there. However, LeEco will have more difficulty in getting subscribers in North America than in China due to competition from the region’s major video streaming platforms such as Netflix. Nonetheless, LeEco can still succeed in North America by selling TVs at extremely low prices. By driving up its sales volume dramatically, the Chinese brand would make a significant impact on the ecosystem of the local LCD TV industry and the consumer perception. At the same time, LeEco could also squeeze the market shares of other first-tier brands in North America.
The consolidation of LeEco and VIZIO will also pose a huge challenge for South Korean TV brands. Taking account of the acquisition, WitsView’s latest analysis projects that the combined shipments of Chinese brands will reach 74.1 million units this year, whereas the combined shipments of South Korean brands will arrive at 77 million units. Together, Chinese and South Korean vendors are expected to account for 70% of the global LCD TV market. In the future, major international brands will continue to enlarge their market shares at the expense of regional brands and vendors of niche TV sets.
After incorporating VIZIO, LeEco will be the only LCD TV brand without in-house manufacturing capability among the global top five and will still rely on Taiwanese and Chinese OEMs. The majority of TV sets shipped by LeEco in China so far this year are large-size models (measuring 50 inches and above), while 30% of VIZIO’s shipments in North America in the same period also belong to the same size segment. WitsView anticipates that LeEco will strengthen its partnership with Foxconn, which has the world’s largest Gen-10 panel fab and controls nearly 20% of the global capacity for large-size panels. With Foxconn’s support, LeEco can focus on large-size and super large-size TVs (models sized 70-inches and above).
Also, both LeEco and VIZIO have worked with Taiwan-based OEM TPV Technology, and this relationship is expected to remain tight following the acquisition. LeEco has a partnership with Chinese TV vendor TCL, and the market is looking at whether TCL can leverage the situation to improve its sales to North America. Another ensuing issue from the acquisition is whether Taiwanese OEMs Wistron and AmTRAN can enter LeEco’s supply chain. These follow-up developments will exert influences on orders going to OEMs worldwide.
The first time I ever saw a Vizio brand flat panel television, it was in a Sam’s Club store in 2005. I had never seen or heard of the brand name before, yet they had a really nice looking HDTV on the shelf next to Samsung’s and Sony’s, but for a fraction of the price. Since then, Vizio has become the largest seller of LCD televisions in North America. You can find their TV’s all over the country, hanging in restaurants and bars, or maybe in a friend’s living room.
Like many people who first discovered this brand, I wondered who made Vizio. I thought perhaps they were an offshoot of some larger brand name, but they are really their own company based out of California. However, don’t think that Vizio is an American-made television. The company might be American, but the parts inside their HDTV’s are not. This should not be a surprise, considering how pretty much all electronic components are made outside of the United States.
The real question here is not who makes Vizio, but where they get their components. Any electronics company can mold a plastic shell and put an LCD screen inside, and that’s just what Vizio does. Rather than manufacturer televisions, you might say that Vizio just has someone else put them together. The majority of the flat panels found in Vizio HDTV’s are made by a Taiwanese company called Amtran Technology. According to an article on Forbes.com, Amtran also owns a 24% stake in the Vizio company. You might even say that Vizio is just another name for Amtran, since the guts of a Vizio HDTV are really made by Amtran.
What Vizio did was genius, because they took a highly desirable product and made it affordable, then put that product in stores that would reach the most customers. It used to be that you’d be hard pressed to find top name brand televisions in a Wal-Mart, but now they carry Sony and Samsung just like the major electronics stores. You can thank Vizio for this. Personally, I wouldn’t be too discouraged by the fact that Vizio’s products are really made in Taiwan, because most every HDTV manufacturer builds their sets from the cheapest possible components, and the majority of them come out of Asia.
According to an August 2009 press release from Vizio’s website, they hold a 21.7% market share as of the second quarter of 2009. Samsung is right behind them at 21.3%, and Sony has 11.9%. If you were to price compare similar model Vizio, Samsung, and Sony televisions, the Vizio would always cost less, with the difference sometimes being hundreds of dollars. A combination of a slowing economy and the recent “digital switch” in the U.S. has really driven up HDTV sales, and Vizio offers a solid product that costs less than anyone else. I know several people who own one, and they are quite happy with their investment.
For some really interesting reading, check out this 2007 interview with William Wang, the CEO of Vizio. Did you know that he is a plane crash survivor?
One of today’s modern technological wonders is the flat-panel liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, which is the key component we find inside televisions, computer monitors, smartphones, and an ever-proliferating range of gadgets that display information electronically.What most people don’t realize is how complex and sophisticated the manufacturing process is. The entire world’s supply is made within two time zones in East Asia. Unless, of course, the factory proposed by Foxconn for Wisconsin actually gets built.
Liquid crystal display (LCD) screens are manufactured by assembling a sandwich of two thin sheets of glass.On one of the sheets are transistor “cells” formed by first depositing a layer of indium tin oxide (ITO), an unusual metal alloy that you can actually see through.That’s how you can get electrical signals to the middle of a screen.Then you deposit a layer of silicon, followed by a process that builds millions of precisely shaped transistor parts.This patterning step is repeated to build up tiny little cells, one for each dot (known as a pixel) on the screen.Each step has to be precisely aligned to the previous one within a few microns.Remember, the average human hair is 40 microns in diameter.
On the other sheet of glass, you make an array of millions of red, green, and blue dots in a black matrix, called a color filter array (CFA).This is how you produce the colors when you shine light through it.Then you drop tiny amounts of liquid crystal material into the cells on the first sheet and glue the two sheets together.You have to align the two sheets so the colored dots sit right on top of the cells, and you can’t be off by more than a few microns in each direction anywhere on the sheet.The sandwich is next covered with special sheets of polarizing film, and the sheets are cut into individual “panels” – a term that is used to describe the subassembly that actually goes into a TV.
For the sake of efficiency, you would like to make as many panels on a sheet as possible, within the practical limitations of how big a sheet you can handle at a time.The first modern LCD Fabs built in the early 1990s made sheets the size of a single notebook computer screen, and the size grew over time. A Gen 5 sheet, from around 2003, is 1100 x 1300 mm, while a Gen 10.5 sheet is 2940 x 3370 mm (9.6 x 11 ft).The sheets of glass are only 0.5 - 0.7 mm thick or sometimes even thinner, so as you can imagine they are extremely fragile and can really only be handled by robots.The Hefei Gen 10.5 fab is designed to produce the panels for either eight 65 inch or six 75 inch TVs on a single mother glass.If you wanted to make 110 inch TVs, you could make two of them at a time.
The fab is enormous, 1.3 km from one end to the other, divided into three large buildings connected by bridges.LCD fabs are multi-story affairs.The main equipment floor is sandwiched between a ground floor that is filled with chemical pipelines, power distribution, and air handling equipment, and a third floor that also has a lot of air handling and other mechanical equipment.The main equipment floor has to provide a very stable environment with no vibrations, so an LCD fab typically uses far more structural steel in its construction than a typical skyscraper.I visited a Gen 5 fab in Taiwan in 2003, and the plant manager there told me they used three times as much structural steel as Taipei 101, which was the world’s tallest building from 2004- 2010.Since the equipment floor is usually one or two stories up, there are large loading docks on the outside of the building.When they bring the manufacturing equipment in, they load it onto a platform and hoist it with a crane on the outside of the building.That’s one way to recognize an LCD fab from the outside – loading docks on high floors that just open to the outdoors.
LCD fabs have to maintain strict standards of cleanliness inside.Any dust particles in the air could cause defects in the finished displays – tiny dark spots or uneven intensities on your screen.That means the air is passed through elaborate filtration systems and pushed downwards from the ceiling constantly.Workers have to wear special clean room protective clothing and scrub before entering to minimize dust particles or other contamination.People are the largest source of particles, from shedding dead skin cells, dust from cosmetic powders, or smoke particles exhaled from the lungs of workers who smoke.Clean rooms are rated by the number of particles per cubic meter of air.A class 100 cleanroom has less than 100 particles less than 0.3 microns in diameter per cubic meter of air, Class 10 has less than 10 particles, and so on. Fab 9 has hundeds of thousands of square meters of Class 100 cleanroom, and many critical areas like photolithography are Class 10.In comparison, the air in Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA is roughly Class 8,000,000, and probably gets substantially worse when an MBTA bus passes through.
The Hefei Gen 10.5 is one of the most sophisticated manufacturing plants in the world.On opening day for the fab, BOE shipped panels to Sony, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Vizio, and Haier.So if you have a new 65 or 75-inch TV, there is some chance the LCD panel came from here.
Irvine-based Vizio Inc. is moving the contract manufacturing hub for its line of larger flat TVs from Asia to Tijuana, Mexico. The shift comes as Vizio aims to cut costs amid a changing economic climate in China and particularly Taiwan, according to founder and Chief Executive William Wang.
Vizio"s subcontractor is setting up at least two plants in Tijuana that will add "millions" of square feet for TV production, according to Wang. "We"re getting ready for mass production soon, within three months," he said.
Vizio will maintain significant production operations in Taiwan, where its smaller TVs, consumer electronics accessories, tablets and a newly launched line of personal computers are made.
The Taiwanese companies, in turn, rely on various suppliers in China"s mainland. Manufacturing costs throughout the region have increased in recent years as rapid economic development lifted wages. China also has raised tariffs on components and materials used in TV production, prompting some manufacturers to consider a shift in operations. The tariffs on imported LCD panels to be used in the assembly of TVs 32 inches and higher recently rose to 5%, up from 3%.
The higher tariff "has the potential to erode the market share of Taiwanese suppliers," according to a recent analyst report from Englewood, Colo.-based market researcher IHS Inc.
Taiwan has long held the market share lead for LCD TV production but the gap is narrowing as some U.S. companies move manufacturing operations closer to their domestic markets in an effort to cut shipping costs. Mexico is an attractive option since the North American Free Trade Agreement eliminated tariffs among the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
It regained the U.S. market share lead in the LCD TV segment in the first quarter of 2012, surpassing South Korea-based Samsung Group, which had held the title since the second quarter of last year.
This isn"t Vizio"s first foray in Mexico. It established partnerships prior to NAFTA with free trade zones known as maquiladoras in the border town of Jaurez.
Vizio"s move to swap some manufacturing in Taiwan for Mexico comes as significant numbers of other companies are bringing production back to the U.S. Benefits such as quicker turns and closer contact with customers have been cited by many small and midsize manufacturers who have brought operations back from offshore markets.
Vizio and other consumer electronics makers aren"t likely to go that far, since many operate on low margins, putting a premium on keeping costs to a minimum.
(Reuters) - LeEco has scrapped a planned $2 billion acquisition of U.S. consumer electronics company Viziodue to regulatory issues, a fresh setback to the cash-strapped Chinese conglomerate"s expansion drive.FILE PHOTO: LeEco"s new Le Pro3 phone is on display during a press event in San Francisco, California, U.S. October 19, 2016. RETUERS/Beck Diefenbach
A new agreement between LeEco and Vizio will now replace the scrapped deal, by which the companies will incorporate LeEco’s app and content within Vizio’s platform, and bring Vizio products to the China market, LeEco said on Tuesday.
Some observers welcomed the withdrawal of the Vizio acquisition plan, saying it is good for LeEco which has owed suppliers money and recently had a sports broadcasting contract terminated due to an unpaid installment.