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Fifteen years ago, in an earlier incarnation as Fortune’s Asia editor, I traveled to the southern Chinese city of Huizhou to meet the 47-year old chairman of what I then considered China’s most ambitious consumer electronics manufacturer.
His name was Li Dongsheng, and his company, TCL Corporation, had just struck a deal to merge its television manufacturing facilities with those of French consumer electronics giant Thomson. The resulting venture, in which TCL had a 67% stake, was preparing to ship 18 million television sets in 2004—six million more than its nearest competitor.
My profile of Li (hailing him as “TV’s Mr. Big”) called that tie-up “one of the biggest deals in which a Chinese company has taken control of a Western enterprise,” and noted that it put TCL—along with appliance maker Haier, PC manufacturer Lenovo, and telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei—among a handful of Chinese companies with aspirations beyond their home market. “No company,” I declared, “has a better chance of becoming China’s first truly global corporation than TCL.”
That conclusion now feels a tad hyperbolic. TCL, it turned out, was embarking on a global odyssey with many twists and turns.
The joint venture with Thomson lost hundreds of millions of dollars and the value of its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange collapsed. European operations had to be wound down; Thomson bailed out. A 2004 deal with Alactel, the French telecommunications giant, to make mobile handsets, ran into similar trouble.
Worse, the chaos of those deals distracted Li from recognizing a fundamental industry shift: the TCL-Thomson venture turned out cumbersome old sets using cathode-ray tubes as consumers were rushing to buy flat-screens using liquid crystal display.
TCL eventually made the transition to flat panel displays, and now ranks No. 5 globally in televisions by units sold. Over the years, the company has diversified into a variety of different consumer electronics products including mobile phones and home appliances, manufactured under its own brands. And Li has made some quirky acquisitions, including rights to once-mighty gadgets like Palm and Blackberry.
TCL still posts solid financials: in 2018 the company reported net income of nearly $500 million on sales of about $16 billion. More than half of revenue came from outside China.
But Li is swinging for the fences. Last year, he announced a sweeping restructuring plan that calls for offloading stakes in nine consumer-facing businesses to a new privately controlled holding company so that the listed TCL Corporation can focus on semiconductors and high-end display technologies.
We’ll have a chance to hear from Li himself about those plans, and his thoughts about the broader evolution of China’s tech scene, when I interview him at the Fortune Global Tech Forum in Guangzhou November 7-8. It’s by invitation only, but there are still a few places left. Register here!
Clay Chandler
On Twitter: @claychandler
Email: clay.chandler@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
