A Case Study Of TCL Corporation's Transformation Based On The Value Chain

With 35 years' development, TCL Corporation has changed into a multinational company from a small business of limited range of products after it experienced many changes brought by market, global business and the Internet. Before 2010, it expanded its domestic business from recording tapes, telephones to color TV, cellphone, LCD panels etc. and became the only domestic consumer electronics company which was operating black-and-white TV and combining vertical industrial chain. Meanwhile, from 1998 TCL Corporation starts its international operation. And the international business and industrial updating was basically in line with its expectation. In today's information era, facing the trans-boundary shock brought by the Internet, TCL corporation continues its strategic transformation of “product + service” “intelligence + internet” to maintain the steady development.Based on value chain theory, this thesis made an analysis of business strategies adopted by TCL Corporation for these 35 years and drew a picture for its future sustainable development from the strategic level in order to provide the reference for its future development and other businesses' operations nowadays.The first part of this thesis introduced value chain theory including its proposal and expansion such as virtual value chain and value constellation theory as well as analyzed the application of value chain theory in business operation on the basis of two cases at home and abroad.With researching the development of TCL corporation's three businesses when it was started, the second part analyzed reasons behind the growth of TCL Corporation for these years based on value chain management theory and value-added creating theory. The reason was concluded that management of TCL Corporation dared to innovate business processes and product and technology etc. while accurately observe users' demand in the complex market.On the basis of value chain management theory and five forces model, the third part studied two international mergers and acquisitions of TCL Corporation and analyzed the causes for the failures. The management lacked of rational analysis and basic understanding of global operation cost and blindly believed their restructuring ability and globalization management ability while did not use their strengths of market observation and understanding of users' demand.In the final part, on the basis of the understanding of TCL strategies, products, technology and business model and industrial value chain as well as platform strategytheory, the thesis attempts to put forward a feasible solution to the new difficult situation that TCL has faced for the past five years in the Internet era of information society, in particular under the circumstance of mobile internet. If the company continues to adopt the traditional linear industrial chain, it could not get accustomed to the impact of Internet Plus, thus it must alter the structure of industrial chain and search for winning opportunities from the connecting point between the industrial supply and demand. At last, TCL should construct its sustainable development strategy model through the qualitative change of traditional four core competencies via internet plus, with Internet Plus as the aiding method, the observation of market development tendency as the precondition, the understanding of users' demand as the approach, user first as the only direction.