Panasonic, once the king of plasma displays and one of the last Japanese companies still making TVs, is exiting the manufacturing business. This marks the end of Japan's dominance in consumer electronics that defined the industry for decades.
If you're old enough to remember when "Japanese quality" meant something specific in electronics, this is a melancholy milestone. Panasonic pioneered plasma technology when it represented the best picture quality you could buy. Their TVs were engineering showcases—expensive, but genuinely superior.
That was then. Now they can't compete on price with Samsung, LG, and Chinese manufacturers, so they're becoming a brand management company. They'll still sell TVs with the Panasonic name, but someone else will make them.
This is the final chapter in a story we've been watching play out for 20 years. Japanese electronics companies built their reputations on quality and innovation. They charged premium prices and customers paid them because the products genuinely were better. Then Korean companies like Samsung and LG started making products that were almost as good for significantly less money. Then Chinese manufacturers entered the market with products that were good enough at rock-bottom prices.
The Japanese companies tried to hold the premium segment. Panasonic's plasma displays were genuinely superior to early LCDs—better blacks, better motion handling, better viewing angles. But plasma was expensive to manufacture and couldn't compete with LCD on power consumption and brightness. When the market chose LCD, Panasonic lost its technical advantage.
They tried to pivot to LED-backlit LCDs, then OLED. But by then, LG owned OLED panel production, and Samsung dominated the high-end LCD market. Panasonic was buying panels from competitors and trying to differentiate on processing and design. That's a hard business to win.
From a manufacturing perspective, TVs became a scale game. The companies that could produce millions of panels efficiently won on cost. Panasonic couldn't match that scale. Their factories were designed for smaller production runs with tighter quality control—exactly wrong for a commodity market where price matters more than perfection.
One industry observer noted: "Japanese companies optimized for a world where customers paid extra for quality. That world doesn't exist anymore for consumer electronics."
There's a broader lesson here about technology industries. Being first with superior technology doesn't guarantee long-term success. You also need to scale efficiently, adapt as markets commoditize, and compete on price when differentiation becomes impossible. Japanese electronics companies were historically bad at all of those things.
The irony is that Panasonic probably makes more money as a brand manager than as a manufacturer. They'll license their name to contract manufacturers who can produce TVs cheaply. Consumers get the brand they recognize, Panasonic gets revenue without capital expenditure, and the contract manufacturer gets scale. Everyone wins except the workers at the factories that just closed.
This isn't just about TVs. It's about the broader decline of Japan's consumer electronics dominance. Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp—these were the names that defined consumer electronics for generations. Now they're either out of the business entirely or getting their products manufactured by someone else.
Korea and China won. They figured out how to make quality products at scale for prices Japanese manufacturers couldn't match. The technology eventually caught up to where the difference in quality didn't justify the price premium. And once you're competing on price in a commodity market, the low-cost manufacturer wins.
Panasonic was one of the last holdouts actually making their own TVs in Japan. Now they're done. It's the end of an era, and honestly, the market moved on years ago. The surprise is that it took this long.
