DSCC says that OLED mobile display production capacity will overtake LCD capacity in 2020, and will reach a 65% market share in 2025.
Looking at the entire display market (mobile and TV and others), DSCC sees OLED production capacity rising at a 20% CAGR till 2025, and OLED's market share will rise from 5% in 2019 to 14% in 2025.
DSCC updated its display equipment spending forecast, and the company now expects LCD spending to stop completely in 2023 - as all new production lines from 2023 forward will be producing OLED displays (DSCC does not include other display technologies in this report, such as QDEL, e-paper and Micro-LEDs).
2019 will see 26% decrease in spending from 2018, with OLED spending down 64%. DSCC sees a rebound in 2020, where OLED spending will jump 132% due to new mobile flexible OLED lines in China.
DSCC updated its foldable OLED market forecasts, saying that it now expects the market to grow slower than it anticipated earlier this year. In 2019 DSCC sees 360,000 foldable panels produced in 2019, with less than 250,000 actual devices sold. By 2023, the market will grow to over 68 million units (a CAGR of 272%) generating over $8 billion in revenues.
Smartphones will remain the leading devices to adopt foldable OLEDs throughout the forecast period, and starting in 2020 DSCC sees clamshell designs with at least a 60% unit share. DSCC sees ultra-thin glass as becoming a significant player, with Samsung adopting SCHOTT UTG starting in 2020. Ultra-thin glass enables an aggressive folding radius, scratch resistance, hardness and a similar touch experience to current glass based displays.
DSCC analysts say that OLED stack materials will grow from $1.04 billion in 2018 to over $2 billion in 2022 - a CAGR of 17%.
DSCC says that up until now it greatly underestimated Novaled's revenues, and it now says that Novaled generated revenues of $97 million in 2017 and $122 million in 2018. Novaled is the third largest OLED material company by revenue - following Universal Display and Merck. The three companies combined will hold a market share of 56% in 2023.
DSCC says that shipments of smartwatch OLED displays grew 124% in the first quarter of 2019, and the company expects yearly shipments to grow 28% in 2019 to reach 63.9 million units.
Even though each single display is small (around 1.4-inch), smartwatches are the third largest OLED application in terms of revenues (after smartphones and TVs) and total revenues will reach $1.5 billion in 2019.
DSCC published an interesting note, detailing the world's top 10 devices by flexible AMOLED sales in the first half of 2019. The list contains only three vendors: Samsung, Apple and Huawei.
Total flexible AMOLED revenues for these ten devices are almost $4.7 billion, and Samsung phones account for 53% ($2.5 billion). Apple has only 2 leading models, but accounts for 30% of the revenues ($1.4 billion) and Huawei phones generated $723 million in flexible AMOLED revenues.
DSCC has published an update to its display fab utilization rate report. DSCC says that rigid OLED roduction has remained strong since March 2019 (following a low period before) mostly due to a reduced price gap with LCD displays, larger screen sizes in 2019 OLED smartphones and aggressive smartphone pricing in China.
Flexible OLED fab utilization remains low but DSCC sees an improvement in June to 42% up from around 30% all over 2019. OLED TV fab utilization remains at very high levels (100%, in fact) and will continue to be high in June.
DSCC estimates that the mobile OLED equipment will rebound in 2020 - up 461% in fact to $8.2 billion, after falling 88% in 2019.
In 2020, OLED spending will account for 56% of the total display equipment market spending, basically returning to the levels we saw in 2017-2018.
DSCC says that OLED market revenues will grow from $26.5 billion in 2018 to $28.7 billion in 2019 and over $52 billion by 2023. The largest application will remain smartphone displays, but several other applications will generate over $1 billion in 2023 - TVs, tablets, notebooks and monitors. By area of production, TV displays will surpass smartphone displays in 2021.
Samsung is still (and will remain so) the dominant AMOLED display producer, even though its market share will drop from 97% in Q1 2018 to 81% in Q4 2019. In Q1 2019 Visionox surpassed LGD to become the 2nd largest AMOLED producer (but most of Visionox's panels are low-end 5.5-inch panels). DSCC expects LGD to regain its number 2 position in the second half of 2019. BOE is the third player and will remain so following its supply agreement with Huawei.
DSCC released its latest forecast for the foldable OLED market. According to DSCC 1.65 million foldable OLED panels will ship in 2019 - which will grow to 60 million panels in 2022 and just over 80 million panels in 2023.
DSCC says that foldable devices should "inevitably succeed" as device makers see these devices as a way to boost high-end smartphone revenues as this market has plateaued. DSCC says that the forecast may be even cautious - although if we compare to DSCC's previous foldable OLED estimates released at the end of 2018, they have lowered their predictions slightly.
