They remain on the shelf until somebody buys them. If they get too old, the shop reduces the price, and sell it off to people like me. Who don't look for TVs with the latest "features".

What makes you think TVs have a shelf life of 1 year? A TV is a TV. It shows pictures, and makes sound. Must be able to pick up shows coming down the antenna, and have an AV input for DVD players/games/satellite boxes/etc. That's about all I require out of my TV.

Compare TVs to handphones, computers, and digital cameras. Things that get "obsoleted" much faster.

What happens to those? The retailer leaves them on the shelfs. Periodically, they hold "sales" to get rid of the old stock. With some places, if sale fails to get rid of the old stock, they drop the price further, and put it in some bargain corner.

Some places drop the price far enough that the unwanted products get bought up by their own staff. If a few "sales" still fails to clear them, they might get bundled free with some other item, just to clear the shelf space.

I doubt they get exported to less developed countries. Why would they buy these things, when the manufacturers of the new stuff are selling there as well. The margin is probably not there to cover the cost of re-export.

However, this does happen with some industrial machinery costing anywhere from $10K plus to $100k to $1m. There are companies that buy these up, and reexport to other countries. Here, the price of the new equipment is high enough, that there is a large enough gap underneath to support the resale of used older models.