(Yicai Global) July 6 -- China’s Hisense Home Appliances Group expects the international market for laser television sets to double in size every year, according to its chairman.

“We expect 100 percent annual growth in the overseas laser TV market,” Gao Yuling told reporters yesterday, “so that its scale will exceed that of the domestic market in the future."

As the Qingdao-based company’s laser TVs enter the overseas market, Hisense plans to use the same model that has been successful at home, Gao said. The firm has tried to integrate the TVs with people’s home decor by allowing them to be used as a picture frame when not in use, which has boosted the product’s popularity, he said.

Gao also said Hisense plans to share patents and intellectual property rights for laser TVs with other firms, so as to promote the overall growth of the industry.

Global laser TV sales are about to soar, said Wang Wei, general manager of Hisense Laser Display, partly because prices are continuing to drop. The price of 75-inch products is now around CNY10,000 (USD1,547), and acceptance among users is also improving, Wang said.

Hisense is making progress in producing core components in China, so the cost of the TVs will drop further this year, Wang said.

Laser TVs use a special screen with a laser light source, offering picture quality benefits compared to standard LCD models. The average annual compound growth rate of laser TV sales in China reached 213.8 percent from 2015 to last year, and the rate for this year is also expected to exceed 100 percent, according to market research firm All View Cloud.

Zheng Haiyan, an analyst with Beijing Runto Technology, predicted that China’s annual laser TV shipments will exceed 1 million units in 2024.

Hisense laser TVs accounted for 53 percent of global sales last year, according to research firm Omdia, with Chinese brands including Hisense, Changhong Electric and Xiaomi accounting for nearly 60 percent of global sales last year.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Tom Litting