Samsung Australia expects to have their first Tizen powered TV’s on sale by May with the Korean Company looking to hold onto their #1 position in the TV market that is set to get a bounce from new display technology set to hit later this year.
Samsung is set to go head to head with LG’s WebOS with the Company claiming that the end of the year more than 50% of their new TV’s will be powered by their own Tizen OS.
Samsung Australia is looking for a 10% lift in sales not from OLED TV’s but their new SUHD display technology which will be available in Australia in the second half of 2015.
Samsung claimed that its new array of ultrahigh-definition LCD TVs, which will be branded SUHD TVs, are based on quantum dot display technology which they claim delivers the same display quality as OLED TVs while improving” their flaws”.
In comparison LG Electronics who are a major sponsor of the upcoming Cricket World Cup is set to mount a major marketing campaign for their OLED TV’s which industry observers claim deliver an “excellent” picture when compared to UHD standard TV’s.
The new Quantum Dot technology can be applied to existing liquid crystal displays a move which lowers the cost of producing a TV compared to the cost of manufacturing an OLED TV display screen.
The revamped LCD Quantum Dot technology, uses nanocrystals that emit different colours.
Samsung Electronics aims to sell 60 million TV sets this year, an approximate 10% increase from last year, according to the head of Samsung’s TV business Kim Hyun-suk.
Thirty million of those TVs will be powered by Tizen, analysts say, based on the company’s long-term goal of enabling Internet-connectivity in all of its TVs by 2017.
The Samsung OS will compete head on with Googles Android platform.
“It’s less of a risk for Samsung, strategically, to roll (Tizen) out on TVs than on smartphones,” C.W. Chung, an analyst with Nomura told the Wall Street Journal recently.
If Samsung does roll out that many Tizen-enabled TVs, the scale will be far bigger-proportionally-than what the company has in mind for Tizen powered smartphones which are tipped to appear in Australia in the second half of 2015.
For smartphones, the focus is very much on the low-end. Earlier this month, Samsung started selling a Tizen phone priced at less than $100 in India. The launch came after multiple failures in trying to release the phone in other markets- Japan, France and Russia.
Nomura’s C.W. Chung noted that Samsung’s reliance on a third-party platform for smartphones will be a permanent strain on the company’s mobile margins.
With TVs, the math isn’t so complicated either. Samsung doesn’t have to worry about souring its relationship with Google, which has long been a key platform partner for its Galaxy line-up of smartphones but not so much for TVs.
