Sharp Exits US Television Business

Having already pulled the plug on its European TV business in 2014, Sharp revealed on Friday (July 31) that it has now also bowed out of the North American TV market.

The dramatic if not entirely unexpected move comes on the back of another set of grim financial results for the Japanese electronics company, which found it running up substantial first quarter losses of around $230 million.

Despite being the first brand to see the potential of LCD screens as domestic televisions, Sharp has consistently struggled more than some of the other big Japanese brands to handle the stiff competition created on the TV scene by the arrival of Korean manufacturers Samsung and LG Electronics . And with new competition looming from Chinese brands like Hisense, it seems Sharp just couldn’t see any way of turning its North American TV fortunes around.

Sharp’s departure from the US TV scene, though, isn’t a simple wind up and move on scenario. Instead Sharp has sold its brand name for North American territories to one of those new kids on the block: Hisense. Under the terms of the $23.7 million deal, Hisense gets both Sharp’s Mexico LCD production plant and the rights to use Sharp’s name on TVs in the USA. So Sharp’s name will live on in your local electronics stores, even if the TVs behind it are no longer coming from Sharp’s own production facilities.

The Hisense move is reminiscent of Sharp’s exit from the European TV market, where it sold its brand name to UMC, a panel manufacturing company based in Slovakia.

It’s important to stress, too, that while Sharp may have been forced to bail out of its second major international TV market in two years, it certainly can’t yet be considered a dead man walking. It still enjoys a decent TV business in its home country of Japan, and it still provides LCD displays for a variety of other smart device manufacturers.

It’s not apparent at this time what the sale of its brand name and Mexican production facilities to Hisense might mean for Sharp TVs currently on sale in US stores. Nobody is saying anything as yet, either, about whether future Hisense-sourced but Sharp-branded TVs will still contain any of Sharp’s proprietary TV technologies.

I gather from communications with Hisense over the course of the past couple of days that there is going to be a press conference about the deal on Tuesday that might reveal more details. If it does, I’ll update this story accordingly.