If a state-owned Chinese company called Hisense has its way, American retailers will soon sell as many Hisense refrigerators as they do Whirlpool and Kenmore, and as many Hisense Smart TVs as Sony or Samsung.
Aggressive, bizarre and brilliant, Hisense is the biggest consumer electronics company in China, owned by the government but with publicly traded shares. Now, it's making a big push to hire Boston area students as part of a bid to become the No. 3 tech company in the world by 2015.
Suffering from an overseas talent gap, the company held a recruitment drive at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday. It treated a capacity crowd of area students — most, if not all, of Asian descent — to a dinner of quintessential college grub Chipotle, neon green Hisense shirts and on-the-spot interviews conducted by top managers including the company's president, Shumin Yu.
Unlike so many slick suits at top tech firms, Yu and the rest of her management team lacked all pretense and ego. They were dressed casually enough for a Sunday hangover brunch. Their PowerPoint presentations made heavy use of the Comic Sans font and clip-art from the 1990s.
"A lot of things very stupid (sic) about Smart TV," said Wei Ping Huang, the company's chief scientist and an MIT alum, before unveiling his company's superior product. "Interface … terrible."
Don't let the inelegance of the pitch fool you. Hisense TVs are the real deal. An intuitive, simple interface is the hallmark of the new Hisense "Vidaa" television line. Hisense has pioneered technology that conceals a good amount of TV guts in the power cord, of all things. And then there's this prototype: a little box that projects your smart TV on an in-home movie screen.
Indecision is not in the Hisense vocabulary. With its $13 billion in revenue last year, Hisense is rapidly expanding and acquiring companies. They interview and hire on-the-spot at these North American recruitment drives.
I got my own taste of the Hisense hard-sell when Yu — named one of the 50 most powerful women in business by Fortune Magazine — offered to fly me out to China for a tour of Hisense headquarters. I chuckled at what I regarded as polite small talk.
"No, they're serious," a public relations consultant interrupted, as if I should break out my calendar and book a flight right there.
Then there's the company's deference to Apple, which borders on parody. A display table at the MIT event featured Hisense tablets that appeared, at first glance, to be carbon copies of the iPad Mini and the iPad. And at one point during his presentation, Huang showed a picture of various set-top boxes and gaming consoles including Xbox and PlayStation. "Obviously Apple TV is the most famous of these," he said of the failed product, without a hint of jest.
I got the feeling Hisense doesn't mind being underestimated. It would be so easy for the U.S. consumer electronics industry to laugh off this company. But that, in my opinion, would be a big mistake.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Chinese tech firm dreaming big
Dengan url
http://bintanggugel.blogspot.com/2013/07/chinese-tech-firm-dreaming-big.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Chinese tech firm dreaming big
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Chinese tech firm dreaming big
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar