TCL has entered the television market by doing what seemed impossible: democratizing the Mini-LED

TCL has become one of the big revelations of 2025 in the television market thanks to its commitment to screens Mini-LED in the mid-range segment.

This commitment to bringing high-end technology to the mid-range has caused the Chinese brand’s sales to skyrocket and has made it one of the main rivals to beat for manufacturers such as Samsung or LG, which have seen how his quota was reduced of sales among mid-range televisions.

Good proof of this is that our readers have chosen the TCL C6K Premium QD-MiniLED as the best entry and mid-range television in the Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025. What is TCL’s recipe for success?

The keys to TCL’s takeoff

For years, TCL was seen as a secondary Chinese brand in the smartphone segment. cheap televisions in Spain. However, its real position is far from that perception: it is one of the three largest television manufacturers in the world, only behind Samsung and very close to LG in annual shipment volume.

According to Omdia data and Counterpointboth TCL and Hisense have surpassed LG in the number of shipments in key segments such as advanced televisions (Mini-LED, large diagonals and higher ranges). In this segment, TCL already has a 19% global share and its revenue share has increased from 13% in 2024 to 16% in 2025, illustrating its growth in the mid-range television market and the increase in its sales volume.

He starting point of TCL expansion we find it in the local Chinese market, encouraged for government subsidieswhich served as a launching platform to finance the expansion of the brand to the rest of the world’s markets.

As pointed out the analysis from Omdia, the great turning point for TCL comes when the local Chinese market, until then its main driving force, slows its growth. In 2025, domestic sales fell 12.2% year-on-year, partly due to the end of the incentive and subsidy programs that boosted demand.

This slowdown catches TCL with its homework done in the international market, so, with China slowing downTCL has had no choice but to turn to other markets. And that is where its change of scale begins.

Europe, North America and Latin America have become its new growth scenario. In a global context where global shipments of televisions fell 0.6% In the third quarter of 2025, TCL managed to grow 2%, and not because of a stroke of luck, but because of a very fine-tuned strategy that mixes price, technology and brand visibility.

Spain has become a strategic commercial laboratory for TCL, where it offers a powerful mid-range, marketing highly focused on sports in general and soccer in particular (with sponsorships for the Spanish team) and an aggressive presence in stores. The result is that TCL already competes in practice with brands that traditionally dominated the mid-range offering such as Samsung, LG and Xiaomi. Especially on the annual sales podium in several large format categories with models from 77″ onwards.

The secret of TCL’s success

The explanation for TCL’s growth in the mid-range television market in Spain does not have a single person responsible, but it has a common thread: TCL understood before anyone else what the European consumer was looking for after the pandemic.

One of those keys is offered Mini-LED panels. Until two years ago, Mini-LED was an almost exclusive territory of the high ranges of Samsung, Sony or LG. But TCL (just like Hisense), has taken it to the mid-range. This has been possible because its costs were reduced and it became an affordable option.

Suddenly, a television with spectacular brightness, good contrast and more dimming zones than traditional LEDs stopped costing thousands of euros.

That has given TCL the ability to build a catalog that no longer only competes on price, but also does it in terms of quality and, most importantly, without the size limitations imposed by OLED technology. TCL is one of the few manufacturers that, for example, has 98 and 115 inch screens and They are leaders in that segment.

This variety of diagonals allows it to reach both those who want a television with more inches for less money, and those looking for a better image quality without paying the extra cost of OLEDs.

Maintaining low prices for a technology such as Mini-LED, which provides a very noticeable leap in terms of image quality, is essential in TCL’s trajectory. While brands like Samsung, LG or Sony differentiate themselves through their own processors and algorithms, TCL has opted for another way: controlling everything from the factory, but focusing on the hardware (panels) which is what it really controls.

For this reason, TCL televisions do not have image processing or algorithms as refined as those of Samsung, LG or Sony, which have dedicated their efforts to developing them. For now, that is not your battlefield. Their focus is on the mid-range and volume, where good “high enough” quality outsells any AI algorithm.

This strategy eliminates intermediaries and significantly reduces the cost of each panel. Their production of Mini-LED screens increased in 2024 and 2025, which has allowed them to amortize the technology faster by applying very tight margins and making it cheaper even when the competition still reserves it for its premium models.

TCL’s strategy regarding its prices is very reminiscent of Xiaomi’s in mobile phones from a few years ago. That strategy consisted of selling units with almost no margin until they gained market share, consolidated the brand and, from there, went up a notch towards more profitable premium products with investments in their own R&D. In that sense, TCL would already be on the second step: consolidating the market.

All this happens just before the 2026 World Cup, an event that historically boosts sales of large televisions. And there TCL has an ideal product: Large format mini-LED at prices well below the competition and with a brand image close to the spectators of this type of sporting events due to its unconditional sponsorship of La Roja.

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Image | Xataka, TCL