Big Splash of Chinese Companies at CES 2015 Not a Surprise

Posted by on Jan 12, 2015 in Blog | 0 comments

American commentators are prone to underestimating the growing innovative sophistication of Chinese companies so for them the sheer quantity and quality of Chinese products at the just closed International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year came as a surprise.  But, they shouldn’t be.

At next year’s CES, there will be even more Chinese companies with even more state-of-the-art gadgets on show that will garner rave reviews.  And with the state’s goal to become an innovative superpower by the end of the decade, there will be a whole lot of ‘surprises’ going forward.

China’s innovation machine is just revving up!

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All the new electronic gadgets were there at CES 2015, held Jan 6-9 in Las Vegas. Android Smartphones, 4K TVs, storage devices from Korea, human-like robots from Japan, and 3-D printers from the US and Germany.

Some came from large well-established brands like Samsung, Toshiba, and HP. Others came from obscure start-ups, surprising some CES observers.

But the big surprise at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show, in our opinion, was the rise of Chinese brands—both in terms of quantity and quality.

Chinese companies occupied close to one-fourth of the exhibition space, displaying, all sorts of gadgets, from tablets, to laptops, to smart projectors, to giant TVs and drones. And some attracted favorable reviews.

Lenovo’s Window Yoga Tablet with AnyPen Technology, for instance, was included in PC Magazine’s “The Best of CES 2015 list,” as was the company’s Vibe Band and LaVie H750 convertible and HZ550 clamshell laptop. ZTE’s second-generation smart projector, which built on the experience of last year’s Sprint LivePro, was also on the list.

That’s certainly a big step for Chinese companies, which so far have been considered imitators of American, European and Japanese products rather than innovators – and, in some case cases, as backyard manufacturers for American and European merchandisers and marketers.

China, the world’s second largest economy, has been trying to catch up with its American, Japanese and Korean counterparts, which have thus far dominated the consumer electronics brand space. But the country’s brands have yet to make it to popular lists – like Forbes World’s Most Valuable Brands List, Interbrand’s Best Global Brands List, and Forbes World’s Most Innovative Companies.

To be fair, some of China’s companies are too young to meet the criteria required by the compilers of these lists – such as presence in the US consumer market. But if this year’s strong CES showing turns into a trend, it may be a matter of time before some Chinese brands make these lists.  

– Forbes