OLED Smartphones - introduction and industry news - Page 53

MagnaChip reported its financial results for Q2 2016, and the company says that there is a very strong demand for AMOLED drivers. AMOLED IC revenue jumped 73% from Q2 to Q1 - and over three fold compared to Q2 2015. AMOLED IC now accounts for 65% of MagnaChip's display solutions business.

MagnaChip explains that this growth mostly comes from the "wave" of smartphone makers in China that started to adopt AMOLED displays in their mobile phones. MagnaChip's ICs were designed into 29 smartphone models, and MagnaChip believes it is the world's second largest supplier of AMLED ICs.

A few days ago Xiaomi launched a new entry-level smartphone, the Redmi Pro - with a 5.5" FHD AMOLED display. According to a report from China, that AMOLED is produced by two Chinese display makers - EverDisplay (the main supplier) and BOE Display.

Everdisplay (EDO) started mass producing 5" 720p AMOLED displays towards the end of 2014. Since then the company seems to be accelerating its OLED program, and is now offering several displays - including indeed a 5.5" one (EDO also produces and develops smaller AMOLEDs for wearables and larger ones for the automobile market).

Samsung Electronics reported good Q2 2016 earning results - revenues reached $45 billion and operating profit was $7.17 billion, highest since Q1 2014. Samsung saw excellent mobile phone sales - mostly from its high-end Galaxy S7 and S7 edge phones. The component (semiconductor and displays) profits were lower than last year, but slightly better than Q1 2016.

The Display segmented improved over the last quarter - led by increased OLED capacity utilization. SDC sees the stable earnings for OLEDs ahead, and the company said that the capital expenditure will be slightly higher in 2016 compared to 2015, and most of it will concentrate on OLED and V-NAND capacity as the company sees high demand for these components.

Last week IHS said that OLED display penetration rate in mobile phones will grow from 13% in 2015 to 34% in 2021, mostly due to the adoption of OLEDs by China-based phone makers (I would assume Apple's OLED iPhones will also help).

IHS now releases some more details on their mobile OLED market forecast. IHS says that mobile OLED shipments, which totaled 257 million panels in 2015 will almost double by 2017 - to reach 455 million units. Shipments in 2016 will reach 367 million panels.

IHS says that the OLED display penetration rate in mobile phones will grow from 13% in 2015 to 34% in 2021, mostly due to the adoption of OLEDs by China-based phone makers. For some reason IHS does not mention Apple - but if OLEDs start to appear in iPhone models, it will have a drastic effect on OLED penetration.

IHS says that following the success of OLEDs, the market for LED BLUs in mobile phones will start declining - at about 2.6% per year in the same period.

Samsung Electronics posted its earning guidance for Q2 2016 - and results are better than expected. Samsung says that revenues rose 3% from a year ago, and profit jumped 17% higher.

According to analysts, sales of Galaxy S7 and S7 edge phones have been better than expected, and the new phones has higher profit margins compared to Samsung's previous generation flagships. Some estimate that Samsung sold more S7 edge phones than regular S7 phones - and the edge variants have higher margins.

Samsung has been developing foldable OLEDs for a long time, and several reports in the past few months suggested that Samsung is working on a foldable phone, to be released in 2017.

Foldable OLED concept (2013)

According to Bloomberg, Samsung actually aims to release two kinds of foldable phones - as early as in February 2017. The first one will be a regular-sized phone that folds into a small device (clamshell style?) while the second will be a 5" phone that will open to become an 8" tablet.

Analyst firm IDTechEx has just released their new market forecasts for OLED displays. IDTechEx expects the market will reach nearly $1.6 billion this year and will grow to $57 billion in 2026.

For the last two years, the company has correctly predicted that plastic OLED and flexible OLED would be the major trend in displays. In the latest report, IDTechEx has revised their market forecast upwards based on the planned increase in production capacity.

There's an interesting story posted at Mobipicker (first time I hear of that blog) that claims that Xiaomi's CEO confirmed that the company will release a smartphone with a curved display - and not only that, but the blog says that the display will be a 5.7" curved OLED - produced by LG Display.

that Samsung Display is of course producing such displays - and even supplying them to companies other than Samsung Electronics - but is LGD ready to do the same soon?

UBI Research's president Lee Choong-hoon says that Apple is set to adopt OLEDs in its phones, and the company will release an iPhone with a curved OLED display in 2018. The curved iPhone will make up for 30% of total iPhone sales (about 100 million units) - but this will rise to 80% to 2020.

In fact, by 2021, Apple couple be the largest OLED customer - buying more OLEDs than Samsung Electronics. Samsung is currently using OLEDs in about 70% of its smartphones.