The Buy Side; Homebody: The race to establish China's first global brand is now led by a little-known contender that wants to purchase a name, not be one.

Byline: Alexandra A. Seno

Most of the world may never have heard of a rough southern Chinese city called Huizhou. After all, it is an unremarkable factory town, at least three hours' drive from Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. But ask any top executive in the international consumer-electronics industry, and he will probably say that in the last few months he has been paying keen attention to the new global force emanating from Huizhou, headquarters of the homegrown TCL Corp. Despite its near invisibility outside China, the company has emerged as the world's biggest maker of television sets and a standard-bearer for the heady international ambitions of Chinese manufacturing companies.

As more and more of the world's goods seem to be made on the mainland, a favorite game among China watchers has been guessing which Chinese corporation will be the first to have a well-respected global electronics brand--China's versions of Apple, Sony and Samsung. In recent years the top contenders were companies like Legend, the computer maker that now calls itself Lenovo, or Haier, the appliance giant with the German-sounding brand. But the current favorite is TCL. While others have been pouring energy and investment into building their own brands, TCL is going in another direction entirely, with a strategy that is less about becoming a big global name and more about controlling several. In the last few months, TCL has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to revive long-established but faltering Western brands. In China it will continue to sell its products under TCL, but in North America its TVs are sold as RCAs, and in Europe its products appear as Schneiders or Thomsons. "We do not see any reason for reinventing the wheel," says TCL chairman Li Dongsheng.

As much as China wants to carve out its own names in the world market, so does TCL. But to Li, piggybacking on established albeit laggard Western names is the quickest, most cost-effective way to win more customers in more territories. Li aims to own at least one world-class brand by 2010, even if the name isn't exactly Chinese. Shauna Li Roolvink, managing director of BrandHub consulting in Singapore, says: "I can understand the rationale because right now consumers ...