TCL held a celebration marking its 45th anniversary and the completion of the TCL Industrial Museum on September 28 in Huizhou, Guangdong.
TCL founder and chairman Li Dongsheng attended the event and delivered a speech. Guests included National First-Class Actor and Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers double award-winning actress Liu Xiaoqing, former head coach of the Chinese Women's Volleyball Team and researcher at Beijing Normal University Lang Ping, and humanities and business observer Qin Shuo. Relevant officials, representatives of TCL's management, and several veteran employees who have long accompanied the company's development also attended, jointly witnessing this important moment of TCL's 45th anniversary and the completion of the TCL Industrial Museum.
Forty-Five Years of Industrial Endeavor, Continuous Innovation, Proactive Transformation and Firm Globalization
"Over 45 years of trials and hardships, TCL has witnessed and participated in the entire process of China's reform and opening up, and in this process completed its own transformation and growth," Li Dongsheng said in his speech, reviewing TCL's 45-year development journey and explaining the industrial choices, innovation paths and globalization practices behind the company's sustained growth.
In 1981, TCL started from a small enterprise in Huizhou producing audio cassettes. In the 1980s, TCL sought opportunities in the budding market economy and entered the telephone industry. In the 1990s, as the market economy system was gradually established, it successively advanced market-oriented reform and ownership reform, and entered the color TV and other consumer electronics sectors. After China joined the WTO, TCL accelerated its march to the world. In 2004, it acquired Thomson's color TV business and Alcatel's mobile phone business, beginning its transformation from a local enterprise into a global company.
Thereafter, TCL further extended into the upstream of the industrial chain and core technology fields. In 2009, facing the reality of China's electronics industry "lacking chips and screens," Li Dongsheng pushed for the founding of TCL CSOT, entering the high-tech, asset-heavy, long-cycle semiconductor display industry. In 2017, he once again drove transformation, and through a major asset restructuring formed two major industrial groups, TCL Technology and TCL Industries. In 2020, it acquired Tianjin Zhonghuan Group, entering the new energy photovoltaic and semiconductor materials industry. TCL thus gradually grew from a consumer electronics enterprise into a global advanced manufacturing industrial group covering core industries such as smart terminals, semiconductor displays, and new energy photovoltaics and semiconductor materials.
Behind the industrial upgrading is continuous investment in technology. TCL currently has 50 R&D centers worldwide, with more than 20,000 R&D personnel. Over the past five years, cumulative R&D investment reached 75 billion yuan, and cumulative patent applications exceeded 120,000. After nearly a decade of technological research, TCL CSOT achieved mass production of printed OLED in 2024. Facing a new wave of artificial intelligence, TCL has proposed "AI toward the real," promoting AI into products, technology and industry, and, around its display and photovoltaic industry capabilities, laying out the "interaction entry point" and "energy foundation" of the AI era, committed to participating in the construction of "AI new infrastructure."
Globalization is another main thread running through TCL's development. From entering Vietnam in 1999, to cross-border M&A in 2004, to continuously improving industrial layouts in Vietnam, Poland, Mexico, Brazil and other places, TCL gradually moved from product export to global operations. Facing changes in the global trade landscape, Li Dongsheng further proposed "Globalization 3.0," emphasizing "invest locally, take root locally," establishing localized operating capabilities covering R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, brand, channels and services in major markets, and proposing to "build five more TCLs overseas."
Over more than four decades, Li Dongsheng has "only done one thing: TCL." From writing "The Eagle's Rebirth" during a business trough, to proposing "taking calculated risks" when entering the semiconductor display industry, to today's "Globalization 3.0," TCL's development has gradually accumulated a set of business methods for facing industrial cycles and global competition: both proactively transform and adhere to long-termism; both dare to enter new industries and fully assess risk boundaries; and the more complex the external environment, the more it is necessary to build localized operating capabilities.
Building a "Century Project," Passing On the Industrial Spirit Oriented Toward the Future
As one of the milestone events of TCL's 45th anniversary, the completed TCL Industrial Museum carries the company's development memories and the city's industrial heritage. The museum is located at No. 26 Eling South Road, Huicheng District, Huizhou, the former site of TCL's predecessor "TTK Home Appliance Co., Ltd.," preserving the construction style of Huizhou's electronics industry in the early days of reform and opening up. In his speech, Li Dongsheng positioned the TCL Industrial Museum as "a century project oriented toward the future, a gift left for the future," hoping to "keep this history for ourselves, for TCL, and for our descendants."
Li Dongsheng said: "TCL's story is not just the story of one enterprise, but a microcosm of Chinese enterprises resonating with the times. TCL is one of the very few enterprises that has personally experienced the entire process of China's reform and opening up and is still thriving today. Therefore, this museum, from the very beginning, was not only meant to record TCL itself, but to place the company's development within the grand context of China, especially the Pearl River Delta's reform and opening up, so that every exhibit reflects the changes of the times."
Through this museum, TCL will truthfully and completely display and spread Chinese industrial culture to all sectors of society. Preserving the TTK original site allows the industrial scene of the early reform and opening up period to be retained; placing cassette production lines, telephones, televisions and today's display and photovoltaic achievements in the same historical context allows the public to see the specific process of technological progress and industrial upgrading. TCL hopes that through these physical objects, it can transform corporate history into public memory, so that the next generation understands how Chinese industry reached where it is today step by step, and the choices, innovation and perseverance of generations of industrialists along the way.
According to reports, the museum has a total floor area of more than 23,000 square meters, with an exhibition area of more than 9,000 square meters. The museum was designed under the leadership of He Jingtang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, adopting a "museum within a museum" design concept, wrapping the old factory buildings of the 1980s with a new "canopy-style" structure, preserving the original industrial texture and incorporating contemporary elements such as glass and photovoltaic roofing. The museum's main curtain wall uses oversized energy-saving hollow Low-E glass, and the corner glass set two domestic records for the largest single piece size and heaviest self-weight of hollow structural glass of the same type. At the same time, the museum is equipped with naked-eye 3D large screens, VR cinemas and other exhibition facilities, combining physical displays with digital technology to present the course of industrial development. The museum is overall planned with "six halls and one courtyard" multi-dimensional exhibition spaces, with more than 3,000 collected items, gathering representative exhibits from the history of China's and the world's electronics industry.
These include a 1:1 replica of the 1920s Nipkow mechanical scanning disk, China's first domestically produced Beijing brand television set from 1958, the world's first generation of home rear-projection televisions, China's first commercial computer Great Wall 0520C-H, and the world's first mass-produced printed OLED 4K display developed by TCL CSOT, among other physical collections. The thematic exhibition halls present the industrial evolution of the electronics industry: the TTK Hall restores a real cassette production line from the 1980s; the Century Television Hall houses more than 100 overseas antique televisions and collectively presents more than 200 early domestic brands, making it the most complete and diverse television-themed exhibition hall in China in terms of brands; the Century Communications Hall fully presents the iterative history of communications from early radio equipment, pagers, brick phones and satellite phones to modern smartphones; the semiconductor display and photovoltaic exhibition halls focus on displaying cutting-edge manufacturing achievements such as printed OLED, photovoltaic silicon wafers and photovoltaic panels.
This batch of precious exhibits spanning a century connects the history of electronic technology development, recording the industrial journey of Guangdong and even China's electronics industry from catching up, to running in parallel, to leading in some fields. At the same time, the museum preserves products spanning different eras, from cassettes, color TVs and brick phones to smart terminals, and each old object also carries the life memories of several generations of Chinese people. The TCL Industrial Museum transforms corporate history into public memory oriented toward society, while also passing on the industrial culture memory of generations of Chinese industrialists since reform and opening up who took root in the real economy, dared to venture and fight, and persevered over the long term.
"What the museum collects is yesterday, but TCL always belongs to tomorrow," Li Dongsheng said in his speech. Standing at the new starting point of its 45th anniversary, TCL will continue to stay committed to industry, adhere to technological innovation, proactive transformation and globalization, and aim for global leadership as it heads toward the next 45 years.
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