Abstract
With the invention of the television, people have changed their living habits, even more can`t live without TV. However, when we look through the TV development, CRT TVs had taken a long time to be popular nearly 60 years. When Plasma TVs was invented as the replacement of CRT TVs, LCD TVs became flourishing just in few years, went from the growth stage of product life cycle into the maturity stage, Plasma instead went into decline stage without passing through the growth stage. In these years, the manufacturers looked forward that OLED TVs could be the next star to let TV industry grow up again by technology innovation, but with the product cost can`t be break down, consumer didn`t want to pay extract money to buy OLED TVs under the recession. So the manufacturers have switched to invest the additional functions for the development of LCD TVs, like 3D TVs, connected TVs and smart TVs. In this study, I would like to focus on LCD TVs, using product life cycle to analysis the competition strategy of worldwide LCD TV branding companies. First of all, I divided the time sequence into two stages, giving the product technology score by different competitiveness indicators of product, then go with ASP or the average size of the average price, so I could analysis it by the two-dimensional scatter plot of the coordinates. Moreover, I used the shipment volume to summary the change of the competitive strategy from worldwide LCD TV branding. According to my research, I have three outcomes of this thesis. 1. Japanese, Korean, American and European brands focused on upgrading the product technology score in the early growth stage of product life cycle, but the Chinese brands focused on reducing the prices of their products. In the late growth stage of product life cycle, the Chinese brand started to strengthen its product technology score, however, the Japanese, Korean, American and European brands had limited space for the product elevation related to their high product technology score originally. It made the LCD TVs with limited differentiation of the two groups in the maturity stage of product life cycle. 2. As the additional function of LCD TVs, the acceptance of European and American markets is higher than China market. In the other words, if I take 3D TVs, Connected TVs and smart TVs as an individual product life cycle, all of them are in the growth stage of product life cycle in Europe and the United States market, but in the emergency stage of product life cycle in China market. 3. In the competitive strategy of LCD TV brands, the company grew steadily if it took prospector strategy to develop lots of new products in the early growth stage. If the company elevated its product technology score in the late growth stage, it should take analyzer strategy to follow by the leading company, in order to reduce the risks and wait for the coming opportunity, avoid making a big step to surpass the leading company; or taking a defender strategy to maintain current market share by launching products for a particular market.