Chinese firms show off cutting-edge products at tech show

People who love to take photos now have a new angle for photography. With a drone and gimbals both developed by a Chinese company, shutterbugs have more fun to shoot from the sky.

"Starting from the latter half of 2014, the market of civil unmanned drone flourished in short time," said Tong Shaonan, marketing manager of DJI, a company based in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

The firm is one of several makers showing their latest technology in the Unmanned Systems Marketplace, an event at the ongoing 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, which opened Tuesday in Las Vegas, Nevada.

"DJI has taken over 70 percent of global civil drone market," Tong said.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, organizer of the show, 400,000 drones for civilian use will be sold in 2015 for a total value of 130 million U.S. dollars, up 55 percent from last year.

By 2018, the global unmanned aerial vehicles market will rise to 1 billion dollars.

Drones are just one of the products that Chinese companies' technology is leading at this year's show. At the crowded drone section at the annual consumer electronics expo, half of the 14 exhibitors are from China.

EHang is another leading drone brand. Its Ghost, controlled via an app on an Android phone, can fly at 79 km per hour and reach an altitude of 900 meters.

Apart from drones, smartphones designed and produced by Chinese companies are also eye-catching.

Xiaomi Mi5 and Huawei Mate7 are strong competitors to Samsung Galaxy S6 and Apple's iPhone 6 in the world's 373.9-billion-dollar smartphone market.

Steve Koenig, director of Industry Analysis of the Consumer Electronics Association, admitted that Chinese smartphone brands are putting pressure to their global competitors.

Xiaomi alone sold 61 million units in 2014, with 70 percent of the sales generated online. Its latest phone, Mi5, is equipped with a 5.7-inch screen and a 20.7-megapixel camera, signaling that Chinese brands are not just focused on making cheap phones, but on quite sophisticated devices, Koenig said.

Large TV screens are another category dominated by Chinese manufacturers.

At the expo, the Guinness Book of World Records had to take a measurement and confirmed that TCL's 110-inch 4K curved screen is slightly bigger than a similar product of Samsung.

Meanwhile, Haier, China's leading household electrical appliances maker, and American company Roku Inc. announced their new Haier Roku TV, which combines Haier's excellent picture quality and slim bezel designs with the simple and easy-to-use Roku streaming experience that gives consumers access to more than 2,000 streaming channels, the largest lineup of streaming channels available on a smart TV.

Hisense, another Chinese TV manufacturer, also unveiled its latest HDTV set, the 100-inch VIDAA Max Laser Cinema TV.

As more Chinese companies would like to invest heavily on research and development, most of them are going farther in the global market.

Lin Lan, vice president of Hisense, said his company's market share in North America rose to 3.4 percent last year from 1.1 percent in 2013, adding that Hisense sold more than 2 million TVs in North America in 2014.