Sharp To Americans: You Don't Want to Buy a Sharp-Brand TV (wsj.com)

Sharp has sued China's Hisense Electric, which licensed the Sharp brand for televisions sold in the U.S., accusing Hisense of putting the Sharp name on poor-quality TVs and deceptively advertising them (alternative source). From a report: The court action is the latest effort by Osaka-based Sharp to retrieve the right to use its own name when selling TVs in one of the world's largest markets. Sharp is trying to recover its position as a global maker of consumer electronics. Hisense rejected the allegations and said it was selling high-quality televisions under the Sharp name. The dispute illustrates the risks when the owner of a well-known brand name gives up control over products sold under that name.

Comments

Hit to the brand

[TWX]

Maybe if they didn't want their brand to take a substantial hit, they shouldn't have licensed it out.

Re:Hit to the brand

[Austerity Empowers]

This falls into the no-shit category, but let's wait for the PRC trolls to come and explain to us that we're mistaken about low quality products being made in China, and utilization of that particular business model being an epic mistake. I say this having been a designer of electronics, having seen what their factories do and just how difficult it is to keep them on task and pulling shady ass shit we explicitly asked them not to do. I cannot imagine how bad it is when you give up all control.

Re:Hit to the brand

[leathered]

My favorite tale of Chinese manufacturing is that factories making genuine products for Western companies have been known to put on extra shifts to turn out knockoffs, using the same machines and tooling that the Western company has paid for. I recall a significant number of fake Cisco products were found to be made in the same factory as the genuine stuff.

Handing your blueprints over to counterfeitors as well as paying for their machines is an almost comical way of slitting the throat of your business.

Re:Hit to the brand

[Ken_g6]

Maybe if they didn't want their brand to take a substantial hit, they shouldn't have licensed it out.

At the time, I gather from another article, Sharp was hard-up for money. They've since been bought out...by Foxconn. Pot calling the kettle black, much?

Re:Hisense USA is actually not horrible...

[sl3xd]

Hisense USA is based in Atlanta (Suwanee GA), not China, though their parent company is Chinese.

All that means is that there's a shell company that imports drek from China, handles local customer disservice and warranty non-fulfillment.

Nearly every multinational company does the same thing -- Apple's Ireland shell company has made a lot of news lately as a tax haven, IIRC. That doesn't make Apple an Irish company.

Re:Why would you buy from them

[sl3xd]

Sharp was a top tier brand -- Sony and Sharp co-funded an LCD panel factory, and Sony TV's used Sharp's LCD panels. (The whole reason Sony was involved in the factory is because they wanted Sharp's LCD panels).

The problem is that Sharp happened to buy the factory just before the housing crisis -- and the market for new TV's vanished overnight. If you took any time to look outside the world of the PlayStation, you'd see that Sony had some serious problems selling their TV & home theatre products during the same period.

With nobody buying, Sharp was unable to sell their own TV's, or LCD panels to Sony. State-sponsored/funded Chinese companies swooped in as the market was picking up again, and Sharp wasn't able to recover.

So yeah... Sharp was unlucky in its timing of building a factory, and the PRC's government decided it was in their interest to spend government money to bankrupt a foreign company. Nothing new about either of those things.