OLED TV: Introduction and Industry News - Page 36

LG Display announced its financial results for Q3 2018 - with revenues of $5.3 billion (up 9% from Q2 2018). Net income in the quarter was $15.8 million (up from a loss of $264 million in Q2 2018).

LG Display announced that its OLED TV business has finally turned profitable. LGD started producing OLED TVs in 2013 and it has been incurring losses for a long time. In 2018 LGD expects to sell a total of 2.9 million OLED TV panels (up from 1.7 million in 2017).

In April 2018 Samsung announced it is developing QD-OLEDs (hybrid Quantum Dots - OLED) TVs. Later reports suggested that the company is building its first production line, with aims to begin pilot production in 2019.

According to a new report from Korea, if Samsung's initial QD-OLED development is successful, it plans to convert an existing LCD line (SDC's 8-Gen L8-1 line) to QD-OLED production in 2020. Samsung's projected investment in its QD-OLED production will exceed $8.8 billion between 2019 and 2021.

DSCC has updated its OLED material market forecast, saying that it expects the market to grow from $829 million in 2017 to $2.04 billion in 2022 (a 20% annual CAGR).

DSCC recently revised its OLED market estimation - as it lowered its forecast of mobile application demand while increasing its outlook for OLED TV capacity. Total OLED capacity is still expected to increase almost 4X from 2017 to 2022. DSCC expects OLED TV material revenues to surpass mobile OLED revenues by 2022.

DSCC estimates that Samsung will begin pilot production of QD-OLEDs in 2019, with a capacity of 5,000 monthly 8.5-Gen substrates. If this is successful, Samsung will double the capacity in 2020 and add a further 30,000 yearly substrates in 2021 and again in 2022. Material revenues for Samsung's QD-OLED TVs will reach $56 million in 2022.

DSCC admits, though, that as Samsung faces several technical challenges before it could launch commercial QD-OLED TVs, its forecast could be way off - there's a good chance that SDC will cancel the project, or it could increase capacity at a much faster rate than DSCC estimates and even scale-up production to 10.5-Gen.

Korea-based OLEDON announced that it has developed a vertical-plane source deposition technology that can be used to produce both small-area and large-area OLED panels. The company is now adapting this technology for ultra-large substrates - up to 12-Gen (3300x4000 mm) in size.

OLEDON says that currently-used inline evaporation processes lower the yields for large-area production due to FMM sagging and difficult control of the multiple sources. The company's vertical plane source deposition may prove to be a viable alternative.

LG Display is seeing high demand for its OLED TV panels, and the company is actually increasing the price of its panels. During LG Display's 2018 China's Partner Day, LGD's CMO says that while sales in Europe, the US and especially Japan are going very well - the sales in China are weaker than expected.

LG Display planned to sell 250,000 OLED TV panels in 2018 in China, but the company has now lowered its forecast to 210,000 units. The Chinese market grew from 60,000 units in 2016 to 120,000 units in 2017. The growth to 210,000 units still matches LG's global growth rate, but the company expected the Chinese market to grow even faster. LG Display does say that sales of some of its partners (mainly Skyworth, who is reportedly getting ready for much larger OLED volumes) in August went up, but still the company decided to shift some of its panels that were destined to China to other markets.

IHS Markit says that high demand for OLED TV panels has enabled LG Display to increase its asking price, and the average selling price (ASP) of OLED TVs have risen from $695.47 in Q1 2018 to $712.48 in the second quarter. IHS expects LGD to increase the price to $731.9 in Q3 and $729.96 in the Q4 2018.

IHS estimates that LG Display will ship a total of 2.54 million OLED TV panels in 2018 - much less than what was claimed in a surprising post in Korea last week (3.7 - 3.8 million). IHS sees the market growing to 3.6 million units in 2019, 6 million units in 2020 and 9.35 million units in 2022.

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.

According to the OLED Association, China-based Skyworth aims to expand its OLED TV module capacity from 300,000 yearly units to a million yearly units. Skyworth will spend $73 million on that factory expansion.

The OLED Association says that Skyworth is the world's 4th largest OLED TV brand, with a 3.2% market share in 2017.

In August 2018, LG Display announced that it sold over 1.3 million OLED TV panels in the first half of 2018 - and it plans to produce over 1.6 million panels in the second half of the year, to reach a total of 2.9 million panels in 2018 (up from 1.7 million in 2017).

According to a new report from Korea's Kore1-News, LG Display is now aiming to produce around 2.4-2.5 million OLED TV panels in the second half of 2018, to a total of 3.7-3.8 million in 2018. The new report does not mention how LGD aims to increase its capacity so much as no new capacity is expected to come online in the second of the year.