Browsers visiting the Vizio TV website are impressed the moment they arrive, spotting bursts of color filling the screen and compelling statements like: “We make high quality technology & content affordable to everyone.”
Continue to scroll and familiar logos pop up indicating corporate relationships with brands you know, like Netflix, Prime, and Hulu.
What’s behind all this exciting footage and explosion of powerful statements? A cutting-edge presence within the television market that aims to compete with older brands.
While Vizio’s promotional focus appears to be state-of-the-art, large, flat-screen TVs, an investigative report undertaken by CNBC researchers digs down to showcase the company’s biggest goal at the moment: selling bargain TVs.
In fact, over 90% of all company revenues are generated by TV sets. That stated, plummeting sales and competitor models have impacted Vizio’s bottom line.
Once the domain of big box stores 15 years ago, the company is positioning itself to dominate ad-supported streaming as well, said CFO Adam Townsend and industry insiders see this as the company’s future.
According to Roku CEO Anthony Wood, “Vizio needs people to buy its TVs, even at a small profit margin, so it can make real money through its homegrown operating system, SmartCast.”
Emulating the likes of Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Google TV, SmartCast seems to be the company’s focus, so the big question is: Can Vizio continue to own the low-cost market or will streaming divert attention and money in the name of higher revenues while keeping prices reasonable? That’s a question best answered a few years from now!
Who Makes Vizio TVs?
If you conduct a deep background search for an answer to this question you will soon find out there is no simple answer.
While these sets are all designed in California where Vizio corporate offices are headquartered, you would have to travel to at least 5 foreign nations (China, Mexico, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam) to see sets rolling off assembly lines.
Manufacturing partners of the Vizio TV brand include Foxconn, Innolux, KIE, Beijing Oriental Electronics Group, TPV, and Zylux.
Each of these companies plays an important role in providing the necessary components and assembling Vizio Smart TVs.
According to sources within the company, the California design team “collaborates very closely with those third-party manufactures to engineer cost-effective designs for their TVs.”
That stated, tensions between the U.S. and China have been strained of late, thus Vizio is outsourcing most of its operations to nations outside China.
For those keeping up with product diversity, Vizio is quietly becoming a resource for circuit boards (made by Innolux and marketed under the Vizio brand name), sold by retailers like Walmart.
Who Launched the Vizio Brand?
Founded in Los Angeles, CA 20 years ago by William Wang, a Taiwanese immigrant who made his own headlines in 2000 when he survived the headline-making Singapore Airlines crash, Wang’s meteoric rise grew out of his keen understanding of marketing and human behavior.
Within seven years, he had attracted enough investment money to begin marketing the company’s first plasma TVs to Costco with price tags under $2,000 into a market where competitors of older, more established TV brands were charging over $10,000 for their sets.
Not content to stop at making and marketing TV sets, Wang next oversaw the development of SmartCast, a software innovation engineered to run his products.
An offer to buy Vizio by China’s LeEco fell apart in 2016, leading to a solid partnership with Taiwanese manufacturers Foxconn and Innolux.
Vizio’s goal is to sell TVs first and foremost and then sell their streaming services where the big money awaits.
“The estimated net worth of William Wei Wang is at least $21.7 Million dollars as of 22 May 2022.” He makes $2,161,377 per annum as Founder, Chairman and CEO.
An Introduction to Vizio TVs
Goals and objectives set by Vizio for current year are, as always, pairing the best features plus affordability.
Added to these ever-present goals “is taking that to new levels with the addition of the IQ Processor to the D-Series of Full-HD TVs and 4K/120Hz support in the P-Series Quantum,” according to TechRadar reviewers.
While 2022 has seen a cessation in producing new OLED TV models, all the 8K Vizio TVs remain cost-effective, and the brand’s new-and-improved Vizio P-Series Quantum X offers the wow factor of an 85-inch screen.
In terms of popularity, shoppers are still relying upon the mix of value and performance they expect of their signature M-Series Quantum, where new M-Series MQ7 and MQ6 lineups continue to drive sales.
While the MQ7 offers a brighter screen, the Vizio MQ6 series remain a stalwart in terms of price and features.
Is Vizio a Good Brand?
Given the fact that Vizio’s overarching mission is to fabricate affordable televisions that are of such quality they can compete with higher-priced competitors, it would be no exaggeration to say that Vizio is a good brand.
Sold by America’s top retailers–Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, Sam’s Club, Target, and Walmart—-more than 80 million TVs bearing the Vizio logo have been sold to consumers, many of whom are repeat brand buyers.
In Q2 of 2021 alone, “Vizio shipped 1.1 million Smart TVs,” wrote Xavier of goodhomeautomation, who learned that “Vizio holds the #1 or #2 HDTV shelf share at many of these retailers.”
Further, a true mark of success is the amount of market share Vizio has claimed from industry giants like Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, and Hisense.
Is Vizio TV Made by Sony?
It’s anybody’s guess where the rumor that Vizio TV sets are manufactured by Sony, but in fact, Vizio and Sony are separate and competing companies that share no commonalities.
Sony is a Japan-based manufacturer and publicly traded company launched in 1946 by innovators Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita.
In 1960, long before William Wang dreamed of Vizio, Sony manufactured its first model, the TV8-301 8-inch portable transistor TV.
Sony manufacturing plants are located in Slovakia, China, Russia, India, Mexico, Spain, Japan, and Malaysia. That stated, Foxconn, one of Vizio’s main resources, also manufactures TV sets for Sony’s American market.
Is Vizio Owned by Samsung?
The answer is no, but fans of the Vizio brand take pride in the fact that “Vizio beats out Samsung in a couple of areas: the number of ports for making connections on the TV and the price of the TVs,” according to The Product Analyst website based on evaluations posted on July 1, 2022.
“Ultimately, the difference between the two brands’ offerings is small, and Vizio has been closing the gap substantially over the last decade,” analysts add.
Samsung has been around much longer than Vizio or Sony. Founded in 1938 as a South Korean trading company, the Samsung brand is not only the largest business conglomerate in that nation, but it has been named the “8th highest global brand on the planet” when companies in the business of producing televisions and other cutting-edge communications products are ranked.
How did Samsung achieve this notoriety and market share? Timing. The company was launched in the late 1960s to compete with start-ups like Sony.
Over time, Samsung’s reputation for quality and innovation have made it one of the most iconic brands in the world.
A Brief Contemporary Overview of the Vizio Company
While Vizio’s corporate ethos consists of making sure the brand is best known for both pricing and quality by using exciting graphics, optimized marketing language and plenty of compelling reasons to choose this brand over others, skeptics have already said plenty about company ambitions that rely heavily on relationships with brands already integrated into the consciousness of consumers.
Bottom line is that affordability will always top lists of reasons to buy Vizio’s signature televisions.
The company continues to grow. According to Wikipedia, “As of 2021, Vizio had 527 employees across the U.S. in states including California, South Dakota, Washington, Arkansas, Minnesota, Texas, and New York,” but that figure may be misleading since the website Craft says that figure is closer to 800 employees as of December 2021.
Diversification Expected to Drive Future Product Development
Connectivity, voice remote and smart, flat-screen TVs “without all the cords” are major selling points within Vizio ads, but expect to see the company’s heavily-promoted SmartCast streaming service to surpass TV set manufacturing efforts because that’s where customer demand and corporate profit making are pointing.
Further, Vizio’s campaign to position itself as an environmentally-driven manufacturer committed to making sure discarded sets don’t wind up in landfills is likely to incentivize shoppers as the brand has been cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its novel approach to reducing electronic waste and promoting safe recycling practices.
If this issue is as important to consumers as price and quality, Vizio will remain an important player in the television manufacturing industry now and into the future.
Resources
https://www.vizio.com/en/tv/overview
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/20/vizio-ipo-tv-company-focusing-on-ads-over-devices.html
https://wallmine.com/people/118684/william-wei-wang
https://www.techradar.com/news/vizio-tv-2021-every-v-series-m-series-p-series-and-d-series-tv-coming-this-year
https://goodhomeautomation.com/where-are-vizio-tvs-made/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn
https://theproductanalyst.com/where-are-sony-tvs-made/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung
https://www.vizio.com/en/about-vizio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizio
https://craft.co/vizio
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