OLED Smartphones - introduction and industry news - Page 38

Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) estimates that a 6" flexible OLED Module (with a touch layer) costs around $78 (and will drop slightly to $76 by the end of the year). Meanwhile the price of a similar rigid OLED is around $26 and an LTPS LCD is around $16.

LCD producers have lowered the prices dramatically in the last two years (from $29 in early 2017 to $16 today), and rigid OLED producers have been forced the lower their prices as well (from $42 in early 2017 to $26 today).

Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) updated its AMOLED market forecast, and the company now expects revenues to grow from $26 billion in 2018 to $50 billion in 2022.

DSCC sees fast growth for the OLED market, driven by flexible and foldable displays - and the flexible OLED market will grow at a 32% CAGR from 2018 to 2022. Only a few months ago, though, DSCC estimated that revenues in 2022 will reach $57.2 billion by 2022.

Sony's latest flagship phone, the Xperia XZ3, will ship in September 24 in the US for $900 - and you can pre-order it now at Amazon.com. This is the single-SIM edition. In the UK, the XZ3 will ship in October 2018 for £699.

The Xperia XZ3 is a high-end smartphone that features a curved 6" QHD+ 1440x2880 (537 PPI) LG pOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset, 4 GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, microSD slot, Dual-SIM (optional) and a 19Mp 4K HDR camera.

As expected, Apple launched three new smartphones. The 2018-2019 lineup includes the OLED iPhone XS and XS Max and the iPhone XR which uses an LCD display.

The iPhone XS is the successor to the iPhone X - this phone sports a 5.8-inch 1125x2436 flexible notch-type AMOLED display (produced by Samsung Display), 4GB of RAM and 64/256/512 GB of storage.

Last month we reported that Sharp started producing OLED displays in June 2018 with aims to ship its first OLED Aquos smartphone in Q4 2018. At IFA 2018, the company demonstrated its first OLED smartphone, the 801SH.

The phone features a flexible edge-type and notch-type 6.2" 3120x1440 AMOLED display, and indeed it is likely that this display is produced by Sharp itself.

Update: It turns out that the display used by Nubia is produced by Visionox and not BOE as we assumed

China-based Nubia unveiled a new smart wearable device called the Nubia Alpha, which uses an elongated foldable OLED display. Nubia says that this device will ship in China by the end of 2018.

If Nubia actually ships its Alpha device before the end of 2018, it may become the first company to ship a foldable OLED smartphone. Samsung is gearing up to start foldable OLED production in 2018 but its first foldable smartphone is likely to ship in early 2019. Huawei is also said to get ready to release a foldable phone before the end of 2018 - using displays made by BOE. In fact BOE is reportedly developing foldable OLEDs for several smartphone makers - which means that it's likely that the Nubia Alpha is using a BOE display.

DisplayMate posted a review of Samsung's latest OLED display - the 6.4" 1440x2960 (516 PPI) flexible Super AMOLED used in the Galaxy Note 9. As we've seen many times before, Samsung managed to significantly improve its OLED quality - and DisplayMate says that this is the best mobile display ever tested.

In the Galaxy Note 9, Samsung concentrated on significantly raising the on-screen absolute picture quality and absolute color accuracy by implementing precision factory display calibration. This could have been a response to the excellent calibration done by Apple in the iPhone X.

UBI Research estimates that demand for OLED smartphone displays is now on a gradual increase, and by the end of the year it will return to the levels of the end of 2017, fueled by new Apple OLED phones and SDC's intention to decrease its rigid OLED prices to better compete with LCD displays.

Looking further ahead, UBI sees the OLED smartphone market growing from 430 million unit in 2018 to 900 million units in 2022. Foldable OLED shipments will grow from 1 million units in 2019 to 18 million units in 2022 - that's much lower than UBI's forecasts published only two months ago - when it estimated 28 million foldable OLED panel shipments in 2022.

The Nikkei Asian Review says that Samsung's OLED shipments to Apple for its iPhone X dropped to only 6 million panels in Q2 2018 (April-June). In Q1 2018, it was estimated that SDC produced almost 20 million panels for Apple. NAR says that SDC expected to ship around 12-15 million panels to Apple's iPhone X in the quarter, so this is a major disappointment for Samsung.

According to this report, the sale's of Apple's iPhone X has been much lower than expected in the past quarter. Apple, however, will reportedly release two new OLED smartphones in 2018 - and in June 2018 DSSC said that SDC's flexible OLED fabs utilization rates have been recovering, as SDC started to produce panels for Apple's 2018 phones, and Samsung's own flagship phones.

In January 2018 Sharp's CEO announced that Sharp aims to begin commercial production of flexible OLED displays for its own smartphones in Q1 2018. A later report from Taiwan suggested that Sharp is converting a third of its 4.5-Gen Taki plant capacity from LCD to OLED. 30,000 out of 90,000 monthly LCD substrates will be converted to 22,000 OLED substrates.

A new report from Japan, citing Sharp's EVP Katsuaki Nomura, claims that OLED mass production at Sharp began in June 2018, and the company will ship its first OLED Aquos smartphone in Q4 2018.