Samsung weighs exit from China home appliance and TV sales this year

Samsung Electronics is preparing to pull its home appliance and television sales business out of China before the end of the year, a move that would mark one of the clearest signs yet that China is no longer an automatic growth market for global consumer brands. The company could make a final decision as early as the end of April, but it said nothing has been decided and that it regularly reviews its global business structure as operating conditions change.

The reported retreat reflects a harder market reality in China, where domestic rivals have improved quality, tightened their grip on consumers and pushed prices lower. That squeeze has hit foreign brands that once relied on China for scale and momentum. Samsung, long a major name in global electronics, has been losing ground in a market that has become more competitive, more price-sensitive and more politically complicated.

If the plan goes ahead, Samsung would keep manufacturing in China for products such as refrigerators, washing machines and air conditioners, but would use those plants as supply hubs for overseas markets rather than for Chinese retail sales. That would amount to a narrowing of Samsung’s role in China, from consumer-facing seller to back-end producer serving other regions.

The scale of Samsung’s struggle is already visible in the numbers. As of April 5, Samsung held just 3.6 percent of China’s TV market, 0.4 percent of the refrigerator market and 0.4 percent of the washing machine market, ranking fifth, 14th and 15th in those categories. Samsung also missed the 2026 Appliance and Electronics World Expo for the first time in years, another signal of how far its China business has faded.

The pressure is not limited to China. In global TV shipments in the fourth quarter of 2024, Hisense and TCL overtook Samsung and LG, taking a combined 30.2 percent of the market versus 26.2 percent for the two Korean brands. In the premium TV segment, Hisense’s unit share rose from 14 percent in the first quarter of 2024 to 20 percent a year later, while TCL climbed from 13 percent to 19 percent, underscoring how aggressively Chinese makers have moved up the value chain.

China still matters enormously as a consumer market. The China Household Electrical Appliances Association said home appliance retail sales reached 902.7 billion yuan in 2024, up 5.9 percent from a year earlier, while exports rose 14 percent to $112.42 billion. That scale helps explain why Samsung’s reported exit is so significant: it would not be leaving a small or stagnant market, but one that remains huge even as local competitors dominate it.

Industry reporting in April suggested Samsung may shift some white-goods and black-goods sales in China to an agency model, a sign that the company’s China strategy may be moving from direct competition to a more limited, lower-risk footprint. For Samsung, the question is no longer whether China can grow, but whether foreign consumer brands can still grow there on the old terms.