OLED Smartphones - introduction and industry news - Page 51

Around August 2016 we started hearing reports of a tight OLED supply and a shortage of AMOLED panels. Chinese mobile phone maker Oppo, for example, confirmed this shortage of AMOLED display panels for the R9 (also known as F1 Plus), and the company's president announced that Oppo will release an LCD variant called R9km.

According to some new information we have, some countries (including the Netherlands and France, and some parts of the US too) are experience a shortage of replacement OLED screens for Samsung's mobile phones. This is true for Samsung's most popular devices - and for both rigid (glass-based) and flexible OLED screens.

UBI Research is seeing increasing demand for OLED in smartphones - especially for flexible OLEDs. The market analysts at UBI estimate that the market share of OLED technologies in the smartphone display market will rise from 16% to over 62% in 2016.

UBI sees most investments in OLED capacity increase in the future going into flexible OLEDs - and by 2021 flexible OLEDs panels will represent about 70% of the total smartphone display OLED market.

UBI says that in Q3 2016, shipments of AMOLED panels for smartphones reached 96 million. This is an increase of 148% over Q3 2015 and a 103% increase over Q2 2016.

UBI sees AMOLED shipments increasing in a CAGR of 41% from 2016 to 2020, to reach 1.4 billion units in 2020. Flexible OLEDs will amount to about 60% of all AMOLED shipped by 2020.

According to reports from China, several mobile phone makers, including Huawei, Oppo and Vivo (BKK) are worried about the tight AMOLED supply, especially as Apple's appetite for AMOLED displays may end up taking up all existing and future capacity in the near future.

The reports suggest that the three phone makers are discussing the forming of a new alliance that will secure AMOLED supply. The alliance will make investment into flexible OLED production by Chinese display makers, and secure capacity - in a similar fashion to what Apple is doing with Samsung and has done before with LCD makers.

Hong Kong-based Truly Semiconductors started working on its AMOLED fab in 2014, and in May 2015 estimated that production will begin in Q1 2016. The fab was delayed, and a few months later it was estimated that production will begin in September 2016.

Truly have finally announced that the fab is now online, and the company is starting AMOLED mass production. Truly published the (rather overdone and weird) video you see above - and according to the video the company is targeting smartphones, wearables, VR and automotive applications.

A post on a Korean site (Pulse News) quotes an unnamed SDC official that stated that SDC will reach its goal of 400 million AMOLED panels in 2016, and aims to ship more than 550 million AMOLED panels in 2017 - a 35% increase. SDC is aiming to meet demand for OLED panels from Chinese phones makers (and, probably, Apple too).

Pulse News also presents the charts above, sourced from IHS. The company sees revenues from OLED shipments rising from $10.6 billion in 2016 to $11.8 billion in 2017. IHS shipments estimates are 455 million for 2017. This is rather a low estimate compared to other reports we've seen, as IHS seems to be forecasting sharp decreases in average panel price as the massive increases in capacity do not translate into much higher revenues.

According to a story on ETNews, Samsung aims to use a full-screen display in its next flagship phone, the Galaxy S8. To achieve such a display, Samsung is using a flexible AMOLED that is wrapped around all four sides of the phone (unlike its current edge phones that are cured on two edges only).

ETNews also says that SDC is set to update its OLED material recipe. The so-called M7 iteration was used in the Galaxy Note 5, the GS7 and the Note 7. But now Samsung is updating its recipe to M8. You can see the different suppliers in the chart above. Most materials are sourced from the same supplier, but of course the suppliers are offering newer, updated materials and Samsung may switch to those.

Apple's move to adopt OLED displays in future iPhones has been discussed many times in the past, and now it is Sharp's newly appointed CEO Tai Jeng-wu turn to "confirm" these reports. During a talk in Tatung University, Tai said that Apple is indeed switching to an OLED display in future iPhones.

Tai further commented that OLED represents the best chance for Apple to truly innovate its displays - so this is both a problem and an opportunity for Apple. This cannot be considered to be a real confirmation as many reports suggest, but it is pretty clear that OLED is the way to go for future displays.

Following the Galaxy Note 7 discontinuation, Samsung Electronics reported a 17% drop in quarterly profits - and its net income fell to $3.9 billion.

Regarding its OLED business, Samsung is sending a confusing message. The company reports a decline in flexible OLED shipments compared to the previous quarter - due to the discontinuation of the Galaxy Note 7. On the other hand, Samsung says that OLED earnings increased as overall high-end flexible display shipments increased. So it's not clear what actually happened...

Samsung Electronics suffered a major blow when it had to halt Galaxy Note 7 production - to both its reputation and its bottom line (reports say the company's profit will drop by over $5 billion following this incident). An interesting story from Business Korea says that Samsung Display is now under pressure to speed up foldable OLED development.

Foldable OLEDs may prove to be highly successful - if these displays will enable novel devices. Samsung is said to develop two foldable OLED mobile phone designs at the first stage - a smartphone that opens into a tablet and a small phone that opens into a smartphone-sized device.