Yoshida in China: Awaiting a Chinese CES

While China has been enjoying extended national holidays this week, the Japanese electronics industry has been fully engaged at CEATEC, its largest consumer electronics show.

An event like CEATEC often produces many "prototype" products without a price tag or launch date.  Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers, masters of this game, trot out working prototypes from their labs each year during the show.

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This is done for three reasons: media attention, to wow consumers along with boosting brand awareness and, finally, pitching Japan as a leader of the global consumer electronics industry. Japan’s engineering community wants customers to know what it is thinking by showing off the CE state of the art.

Japanese CE companies depend on shows like CEATEC to showcase new products. In the midst of an industry slump, Japanese companies also use trade shows to boost employee morale and to restore industry mojo.

While reading about some hot products at CEATEC, though, one question suddenly popped into my head: When will we see a big consumer electronics trade show like CEATEC or CES in China?

We're not talking about Computex in Taipei but rather full-blown consumer electronics extravaganza in either Shenzhen, Shanghai or Beijing.

Big-name Chinese consumer brands like TCL, Haier, Konka, HiSense and others already have a big presence in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show – the mother of all CE shows.



If China is truly moving up the electronics food chain to become a “designer” of technology (as opposed to merely a consumer or manufacturer), it's only a matter of time before China organizes its own world-class consumer electronics show. It's inevitable, just as post-war Sony transformed itself from a transistor company to the designer of Trinitron TV in 1966.