Yup. 100″ of QLED is the claim made at the Skyworth 2023 tech road show held in Jhb yesterday.
Skyworth is one of those brands that perhaps you’ve seen floating around in the mass market retail chains – primarily in the TV department. And not knowing it, with the keen pricing that it attaches to its products one might be forgiven for reverting to type and buying one of the more established brands instead.
You might be making a mis-step though. Skyworth is in fact a high end Chinese brand – very much mass market with figures that will startle you. Firstly they are the #1 seller of TVs in China and #3 globally. Yup. This is no fly by night cheap and nasty – this is a Very Serious Brand and as we have seen in the car markets with the new Chinese offerings on hand the standard of kit is not to be sneezed at.
You can see the quality for yourself in the panels. The tech being used is state of the art cutting edge stuff and local buyers have cottoned onto this faster than you can say ‘sold’. From almost nowhere the sales of these units has been brisk and it is only going to increase over time, and from what I am seeing, rapidly so. If we ever get a review unit or pricing, I’ll let you know – for now the best I can offer you is to pop off to your nearest Gaamay and do what you can there to assess what appears at first glance to be compelling value.
There is more – much was made of the relationship with the BMW design group and touches of this are seen in not only the panels but now in appliances. You don’t sell to over 300M consumers world wide and not develop other product lines – there are sound bars that look interesting, a coffee table cum cooler cum speaker system that, I have to confess, I’m not entirely sold on, but hey. I won’t judge. There is a washing machine that looks extremely high tech and even fridge and fridge freezer combinations on the way very soon that I think are going to start to set the cat among the pigeons for the likes of Samsung.
As with all new entrants from China into our local markets it is going to take some fine tuning and tweaking to get the product balance right but as we are seeing in the car segment, the Chinese are nothing short of astonishing in their speed to adapt and clearly, they really do listen to feedback extremely closely. It means that it will not be long before the factory that has already been put up locally begins to assemble a significant range of product that will start to rival established brands that have every reason to begin to start to feel nervous.
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