TCL founder Dongsheng Li says the US is driving deglobalization

Armed conflicts, latest protectionist regulations and deteriorating diplomacy are making the cross-border movement of products, services and other people harder.

But Dongsheng Li, the founder and CEO of TCL Technologies, gave his own account of deglobalization on the Fortune Innovation Forum on Wednesday. He believes that is being driven by US policy.

“When we talk about deglobalization, we mainly talk about the deglobalization of technologies, represented by the United States,” Li said in a conversation with Lucky China Editor-in-Chief Maiwen Zhang in Hong Kong. (The interview was conducted in Mandarin, with simultaneous translation into English).

New Biden administration rules goal China’s ability to develop strategic technologies. The US is obstructing sales of advanced chips and chip-making equipment to Chinese corporations and banning foreign investment in sectors comparable to AI and quantum computing.

The U.S. can be barring electric vehicles whose components were manufactured in “countries of concern” — a designation that features China — from qualifying for tax breaks under the Inflation Reduction Act. More recently, the Biden administration has called Chinese electric vehicles a possible security threat, fearing that cars could send data back to Beijing.

With measures like these, the US is “restricting China’s technological development,” Li said on Wednesday.

While Li criticized U.S. policy toward China, he accepted a number of the broader criticisms of world economic integration. “We should admit that the benefits of globalization are not distributed fairly among all countries,” he said.

TCL’s global expansion

TCL is a big Chinese electronics company founded by Li within the southern Chinese city of Huizhou in 1981. The company is maybe best known worldwide for its reasonably priced televisions. It is the second largest TV manufacturer on the earth after Samsung Electronics. But it also makes smartphones and residential appliances and invests heavily in semiconductor and solar panel production.

As Assets wrote in 2004: TCL was one in all the primary Chinese state-owned corporations to scale back its share of state ownership below 50%. The company was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1999.

Li recalled the corporate’s journey to global prominence in Hong Kong on Wednesday.

During its first visit to CES in Las Vegas within the Nineties, TCL had only a small, nine-square-meter booth in a Hong Kong Trade Development Council pavilion. TCL’s booth on the show has since been expanded to 1,700 square meters, much like Samsung’s booth space on the show, Li said.

But TCL’s path to global growth hasn’t at all times been smooth.

In the early 2000s, TCL took an enormous step onto the world stage by establishing two large joint ventures with European corporations. In 2003, TCL formed a three way partnership that combined its TV manufacturing operations with those of French manufacturer Thomson, creating the world’s leading television manufacturer largest TV manufacturer by the point. The next yr, TCL tried one other three way partnership with French telecommunications company Alcatel to make phones.

None of the plans worked. Both until 2006 Joint ventures had collapsed after long losses. (One reason TCL’s cope with Thomson fell through? The French company continued to make bulky CRT TVs whilst the world switched to flat-panel displays.)

On Wednesday, Li recalled that he pushed forward the joint ventures to assist TCL gain a foothold in international markets. “At that time, we were the best in China when it came to color TVs and mobile phones, but we had no presence in international markets,” he said.

But the joint ventures were an excessive amount of for a Chinese company that had no experience with international operations. “Suddenly we became a global company. “I have to take care of a lot of American and European employees,” something he was “not able to do” on the time, Li said.

Today, TCL has operations in 160 countries and operates 32 production sites worldwide. On Wednesday, Li suggested that the corporate’s global supply chain could help protect it from rising trade protectionism all over the world.

In extreme cases, “If you produce your entire product in the United States, U.S. protectionist measures won’t be effective, right?” he mused.