S-LCD Corporation is the joint venture of The Japanese Entertainment and Electronics Giant Sony Corp and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. It established in 2004 in Chungcheongnam-do plant, South Korea. It’s vision was to create a new defination of LCD TV and they succeeded. Most of the Credit goes to Samsung who had the advanced manufacturing and great intellectual property in the market. To achieve this success, both the company invested approximate $1.8 Billion in the venture where the share distributed equally 50-50. But till now, Sony has gone through a massive loss of $6 Billion in its Television business till now since the S-LCD venture established. Now Samsung holds 51% and Sony holds 49% of the joint venture share.
LCD (Liquid Crystal Diaplay) technology is based thinner and lighter television and monitor with Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode (AMOLED) screens instead of avoiding traditional cathode-ray tube products. In the race of Making TV, Sony is currently in Third place where as Samsung is First and LG Second. Currently Sony got 4 TV Plants in Brazil, China, Japan and Malaysia and already sold off its TV factories in Mexico, Spain and Slovakia in the past few years. Sony realised that they could do better business in other activities rather than making S-LCD TVs.
Recently, Sony announced that they are going to be partner of Ericsson’s share in Sony Ericcsson joint mobile phone venture. Sony has taken this smartphone business seriously. Definitely, it’s better to earn a little profit rather than having a big loss in S-LCD TV business. It indicates that Sony will back out from S-LCD TV and invest their money in here. But a reliable source of one of this companies shared some imformation on condition of anonymity taht, “Under the contract on the LCD joint venture, the two parties are allowed to discuss such matters, which outsiders could misunderstand as a step for Sony to withdraw from the joint venture” .
Will this break up Sony-Samsung brings a good news to Sony? Will the new Smart phone business (if continues) can cover up the losses of Sony? Well, it’s time to wait and watch!
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