Vestel, the big Turkish TV brand and OEM supplier for Europe, used IFA to unveil plans to offer UltraHD HDR OLED TVs. The first sets at 55” and 65” should be ready for the market before the end of the year.
The TVs will use panels from LG Display and will feature HDR10 compatibility. Support for Dolby Vision is still in discussion. The TV electronics and set design is all done in Turkey, as is assembly mass production.
In LCD, HDR TVs, this started in 2016 as well with a line running from 40” to 65”. They all support 100% of the P3 color gamut. This line will be refreshed in Q1’17 and the use of quantum dots to expand the color gamut is still undecided.
We also discussed the relationship between Vestel and Toshiba to get a few more details on their new arrangement. As we have already reported (Vestel Wins Toshiba Brand for TV in Europe), Vestel is licensing the Toshiba brand name for Europe and will manufacture, distribute and perform sales and marketing. The two will cooperate on product design and on picture quality technology. For the near term, this will be led by the Toshiba side.
Toshiba and Vestel have cooperated for some time with Vestel primarily supplying lower end mainstream TVs to brands like Finlux, Hitachi, JVC and Toshiba in Europe. This new deal allows Vestel to now start to enter the higher end part of the market and to be responsible for the Toshiba brand. The Toshiba HQ will remain in the UK, but Vestel will now have to hire more sales, marketing and channel management personnel. The deal should be good for both companies. Liam La Cumbre, previously with Toshiba’s B2B display business, is heading up the Sales and Marketing activities of the Toshiba brand and will be based in Langley, UK.
As well as the consumer products, Vestel had a wide range of its professional and B2B products on show.
Vestel, along with others, is suffering from shortage of panels at the moment and we heard that there was a view that there was ‘little point being at IFA as we can’t take orders for much! (CC/BR)
