TCL’s growth reflected in big fridge

WHAT’S BIG, gray, and cool? TCL’s new refrigerator, that’s what.

On July 26, TCL had a live cooking demo with celebrity chef and award-winning cookbook author Myke “Tatung” Sarthou at his Quezon City restaurant, Azadore. The chef is a convert: he changed the fridge in his studio to TCL’s Free Built-in Series Refrigerator.

The fridge has a 170-liter freezer capacity, while the chiller compartments have a 351-liter capacity. It has zero-frost, and a freezer compartment that could be converted into a chiller.

Mr. Sarthou says, “Straightforward lang, I’m so impressed by the advanced cooling system, the convertible zone that I can adjust anytime I want to, and of course, the spacious interior that allows me to organize my ingredients efficiently, making meal prep a breeze for my daily content also.”

Mr. Sarthou, next to content creator Joyce Pring-Triviño, prepared chopped salad with toasted nuts, chicken steak with mushroom fried rice, and mango jubilee for dessert (they used the fridge during the demo, of course).

In an interview with ����ý, the chef said that he switched his old fridge to this new one because, “Hindi siya nao-organize ng maayos (it couldn’t be organized well),” referring to his old fridge. “It turns out really messy, and ang daming sayang (it made me waste a lot of food).”

TCL Brand Manager Joseph Cernitchez told ����ý in an interview that what they were proud of in the fridge was the precise temperature control. While other brands just have low, medium, or high settings, theirs are measured in centigrade, from -20 for the lowest temperature in the freezer, to -1 for the chiller.

TCL, better known for its televisions, released their fridge category only four years ago in the Philippines, and in 2022 to 2023, they grew 193%, according to Mr. Cernitchez. Currently it has a 25% to 30% market share, he said. “For 2023 and 2024, we’re trying to push it more,” he said.

TCL is a brand by the TCL Technology Group Corp., based in China and founded in 1981. Chinese brands, despite their ubiquity, don’t always enjoy stellar reputations due to perceptions of their low price and their quality (among other things). Mr. Cernitchez, speaking about the fridge (which costs about P70,000 — others in their category can cost up to the hundreds of thousands) said that almost all of their competitors have their parts manufactured in China, anyway.

“Some of our competitors, we’re the ones who manufacture their parts,” he said.

Their end-to-end model of manufacturing their own parts for their own products is one of the ways they keep their prices low. “We manufacture our products. Unlike with competitors, they ask other factories to build parts for them and they assemble everything in their warehouses.” — Joseph L. Garcia