The Real Reason Hisense TV's Are So Affordable

TV prices seem to be the one thing that remains unaffected by inflation, but Hisense takes it to a whole new level. For instance, if you wanted to buy a 65-inch 4K television at Best Buy with a budget under $1,500, you'd be able to get a Samsung QN90F Series for around that price or a TCL QM8K Series for around $1,300. However, the Hisense Class U8 Series sells for around $1,000. In this case, a simple on-the-surface analysis would conclude that the reason why the Hisense TV is so much cheaper is that it's just lower quality or you're sacrificing some vital features. That isn't true. The Hisense uses a quantum-dot LCD panel with mini-LED, exactly the same as the Samsung and the TCL, and actually supports Dolby Vision, whereas the Samsung doesn't. Hisense TVs aren't one of those cheap ones that aren't worth your money.

For you to properly understand how Hisense is pulling this off, you have to view things at a macro level. First of all, the company has immense scale. It shipped 29.14 million TVs in 2024 alone, accounting for 14% of the global share, making it the second largest worldwide. When a company is selling at such high numbers, that means it's also buying components at a similar scale, which gives it room to negotiate cheaper parts and negate R&D costs over more units. Hisense has leveraged this even more and adopted an aggressive low average selling price strategy, especially in the U.S. Such low prices will attract otherwise coy buyers and undercut more popular brands like Samsung, LG, and Sony.

The Hisense Group as we know it has been around for over half a century, but its major moves to dominate the United States market really started in 2015 when a struggling Sharp announced it would exit the Americas. Hisense snatched up its brand licensing and TV factory in Tijuana, which gave it a North American manufacturing base and slashed transportation costs.

Next, in 2017, Hisense bought 95% of Toshiba Visual Solutions, an acquisition that brought with it R&D, patents, engineers, and know-how that was enough to give its products that "premium feel" without the usual price tag. A couple of years after, Hisense pushed its VIDAA smart-TV platform, which saved a lot of money on per-unit licensing fees — even though it still sells many U.S. sets with Google TV.

Then, in 2021, Hisense doubled down on North American manufacturing and acquired a new industrial park in Monterrey, Mexico, as its second site alongside Tijuana. This close-quarter, cross-border manufacturing allows Hisense to make products at higher capacity with shorter supply lines and therefore cheaper costs. By 2024, it expanded the regional strategy even further by going south and starting local TV and A/C production in Brazil through partnerships. These kinds of moves also form tariff resistance, so it's not among the growing list of companies that have to worry about tariffs.