The launching ceremony of the book The Rebirth of Eagle that reveals the 30-year history of TCL was held in Beijing on January 4, in which Li Dongsheng, board chairman of TCL and the financial writer were present. The preface of this book was written by the famous economist Wu Jinglian. On the following, TCL published a financial report, forecasting that the company’s whole-year revenue in 2011 could reach 155-180 million yuan, up 230%-280% from a year before. The drastic business increase and the publication of new book greeted TCL at the beginning of 2012, signaling its high profile in this year.
　　Li Dongsheng’s business life is full of undulations. In November 2003, 40-year-old Li Dongsheng acquired the TV making business of Francebased Thomson with 560 million U.S. dollars and founded a joint venture, in which TCL took 67% of the stake. This is one of largest cases of Chinese companies’ acquiring foreign companies. However, Li Dongsheng failed to make clear of the development orientation of TV industry and believed that Thomson’s DLP had a better outlook than plasma TV. He invested a lot of capital into it and suffered great loss.
　　In 2007, Li Dongsheng had to close TCL’s plant in Europe and moved his ambition back to China. He met a period with a quick upgrade from color TV to liquid crystal TV. This time he grabbed the opportunity and steered TCL to march towards the right direction. By now TCL has already possessed the ability of producing LCD panel, LCD module and the whole TV. In the first half of 2011, the company’s total revenue reached 27.355 billion yuan, up 18.08% from a year before.
　　Previously there were four color TV giants in China – Changhong, Konka, Skyworth and TCL. Now Li Dongsheng was the only one of the highest-ranked executives of these four companies at his age that is still engaged in this field. In February, he said in an interview that he never thought of retirement. He would stick to his dream of developing TCL into a respected and innovative company in the world.