TCL Corp., one of China’s largest consumer electronics companies, said Tuesday sales of its TCL-brand mobile phones fell 47 percent year on year in December in their eighth straight month of declines.

TCL sold 571,687 own-brand mobile phones in December, compared with 1.09 million in the same month in 2003, the company said in a monthly sales statement.

The company said it sold 670,302 “TCL-Alcatel” mobile phones in December.

In April, TCL agreed to form a mobile phone joint venture with France’s Alcatel.

TCL said its color television sales on the Chinese mainland rose to 1.38 million units in December, from 1.21 million units in December 2003. It sold 1.15 million color TVs overseas in December, compared with 385,934 units in the same month in 2003.

The large on-year jump in overseas color TV sales likely reflects contributions from a joint venture formed between TCL Corp.’s Hong Kong-listed unit, TCL International Holdings, and France’s Thomson.

TCL Corp. said it began to include overseas color TV sales from the Thomson venture in its overseas color TV sales data after August.

In the July-September period, TCL posted a 69 percent year-on-year decline in net profit to 34.2 million yuan (US$4.13 million), while the company’s core revenue rose 68 percent to 11.04 billion yuan in the same period.

(Shenzhen Daily January 19, 2005)