Samsung’s Reign As The World’s Leading TV Seller Under Threat From Surging Chinese Brands

As recently as March 2024 Samsung was busy celebrating being revealed as the world’s biggest selling TV brand for the 18th year in a row. A run so extensive and unbroken that the annual global TV leader announcement has long felt like little more than a formality barely worthy of a news story any more.

Recent data, however, from renowned global market research firm Counterpoint Research suggests that not only is Samsung’s long reign at the top under greater threat than it has been for years, but that this sudden threat is no longer coming from its traditional South Korean rival, LG. Instead its sales lead is being eaten into by not one but two Chinese brands: Hisense and TCL.

Counterpoint Research’s TV sales data on the third quarter of 2024 reveals that when it comes to global shipments of all types and price of TV, Samsung’s 15% market share is now only 3% above the 12% scores recorded by both Hisense and TCL. Samsung’s sales share decreased slightly versus the previous quarter, while Hisense saw its sales jump by 19% over the same quarter in 2023 — a big enough leap to allow the brand to sneak ahead of TCL into second place on the 2024 Q3 TV shipment chart. Both Chinese brands now come in 2% above LG’s third quarter market share, too.

The extent to which Hisense and TCL are eating into Samsung’s lead becomes even more stark in the premium TV category. Comprising relatively high-end technologies such as Quantum Dot Mini LED, Quantum Dot LCD, LCD 8K, Quantum Dot OLED, WOLED and Micro LED, the premium TV market is where the main TV brands can really start to turn a profit — so it’s striking to see Counterpoint’s sales data recording Samsung’s market share dropping all the way from 43% in the third quarter of 2023 to 30% for the third quarter of 2024. At the same time that Hisense’s market share increased from 14% to 24%, and TCL’s market share jumped from 11% to 17%.

This means the Chinese brands have effectively doubled their premium TV sales versus the third quarter of 2023, pushing LG down from 2nd spot in the premium category, with 20%, to 4th with 16%.

Driving these new challenges to Samsung’s TV dominance, according to Counterpoint Research’s findings, is the demand for truly king-sized screens of 85 inches and more, with both TCL and Hisense pursuing this fast-growing part of the TV market more aggressively than Samsung has.

It’s not all bad news for Samsung (and LG) in the TV world, though. For one thing, overall global TV shipments and premium TV shipments are both up year on year, with the total TV market growing by 11% compared with the third quarter of 2023, and premium TV shipments increasing by a whopping 51% versus the same quarter last year. Shipments of Mini LED TVs increased by 102%, in fact — and that remains an area of renown for Samsung, despite Hisense and TCL also making significant sales progress in the Mini LED category.

Samsung also recently revealed that it was going to be focusing on expanding its super-sized TV offering for 2025, especially the 100-inch plus category, to try and win back territory it’s lost there over the past 12 months. How successful this strategy might prove will depend on how good these massive new Samsung TVs are, of course, and what sort of value they represent versus TCL and Hisense’s typically aggressively priced super-sized TVs.

In the end, though, the clearest winner of this increasingly bloody TV battle may well actually be us consumers, as we suddenly find ourselves faced in 2025 with an unprecedented choice of TVs selling for increasingly competitive prices. Watch this space…

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