The leadership of Japan's TV market is shifting from Japanese corporations to Chinese-affiliated corporations.
As Japanese home appliance corporations that once dominated the global TV market have one after another abandoned production, the share of Chinese-affiliated corporations in Japan has neared 60%.
According to the Sankei Shimbun on the 19th, with Sony Group recently deciding to hand over leadership of its TV business to a joint venture with TCL of China, the share of Chinese-affiliated TVs in Japan is expected to surge from the 50% range to 60%.
Currently, No. 1 in Japan's TV market is Regza (26.0%, 2025 Japan market share), established after China's Hisense acquired Toshiba's TV institutional sector.
Adding the shares of Hisense's own brand (16.6%) and TCL (10.2%) shows that more than half of the Japanese market is already under Chinese-affiliated capital.
With even Sony (8.4%) effectively stepping back from in-house production, Panasonic Holdings (8.4%) has become the only major Japanese appliance maker still producing its own TVs.
Japanese corporations came to dominate the global market in the 1960s with cathode-ray tube TVs and Sony's "Trinitron."
But after the 2011 switch to terrestrial digital broadcasting, they began to decline under price competition.
At the time, Japanese companies focused on volume-driven, low-margin market share battles, but later lost ground to Korean corporations such as Samsung Electronics and to Chinese corporations competing on low prices, causing profitability to deteriorate rapidly.
Eventually, in 2012 Hitachi Ltd. halted TV production in Japan, in 2018 Toshiba sold its TV business to Hisense, and in 2024 Mitsubishi Electric ended sales.
Japanese appliance makers are now shifting their business structures from consumer electronics such as TVs to higher-revenue areas such as digital solution services in infrastructure.
Experts said, "For Japanese consumers, the 'Japanese brand' may remain, but in practical terms a structure in which Chinese-affiliated products dominate the market will become entrenched."