Market updates - Page 20

UBI Research estimates that Samsung Display will increase its foldable OLED panel production from ~8 million units in 2021 to 18 million panels in 2022. This will enable Samsung Electronics to increase its foldable phone shipments from around 7 million in 2021 to over 14 million in 2022.

As SDC's foldable panel capacity increases, the company will also have to increase is foldable OLED module production capacity, and the UTG glass processing capacity at Dowoo insys. subsidiary.

Samsung Electronics reported its financial results for Q3 2021, with record quarterly sales ($63 billion USD) and an increase of 31% in net profits (to $10.5 billion).

The strong performance was mostly thanks to Samsung's chip business and the weak Korean won. Samsung's display business also enjoyed a good quarter, with strong sales of small and medium-sized OLED panels. Samsung's large-area LCD business, though, posted losses as prices of LCD panels declined.

LG Display reported its financial results for Q3 2021. Revenues increased 7% from Q3 2020 to reach 7,223 billion KRW ($6.2 billion USD) while net income was 463 billion KRW ($396 million USD).

LGD says that it enjoyed high demand for IT panels, and its large-size OLED business continues to "strengthen its position in the market as the premium TV sector continues to grow". LGD expects to ship 8 million OLED TV panels in 2021, with record annual profit.

DSCC says that 2021 will see strong growth in OLED production. Flexible OLED production glass input is expected to grow by 36% in 2021, while rigid OLED input will grow even stronger at 42%.

The utilization rates at OLED production lines are still relatively low, especially at BOE's flexible OLED lines. As of the end of 2021, flexible OLED utilization rates are around 70%, rigid OLED utilization is at about 77% while OLED TV utilization is higher at around 85%. LG's utilization rates are lower than earlier in 2021, which DSCC says is intentional to support prices

According to a report from China, BOE will produce around 15 million AMOLED panels for Apple in 2021, or about 10% of Apple's total OLED panel orders.

BOE is supplying displays for refurbished iPhone 12 devices, and Apple is now looking into adopting BOE's panels in the iPhone 13. It is likely that the 15 million shipments estimate relies on Apple's approval of BOE's iPhone 13 panels, and even so it might be a bit optimistic that BOE will supply so many panels by year's end.

DSCC says that LG Display continues to improve the production at its 8.5-Gen WOLED TV fab in Guangzhou, and it finally managed to have the production cost in China be lower than a comparable OLED TV made in Korea.

DSCC estimates that the production cost in China by the end of 2021 will be 13-14% lower than that of LG's Korea fabs.

UBI Research estimates that Samsung Display shipped 124.76 million smartphone AMOLED panels in Q3 2021, an increase of 24.6% from the previous quarter, enjoying high demand from Apple for its iPhone 13 series.

SDC produced and shipped 62.63 million rigid panels (or about 50% of its total shipments), for low-end and mid-tier smartphones. Flexible OLED shipments were 58.2 million units (out of which 39.31 million went to Apple), and foldable OLEDs shipments reached 3.93 million units.

In recent months, the world is suffering from a serious semiconductor component shortage, due to several reasons that all seemed to have join forces - increased demand for IT products due to the pandemic, extreme weather conditions in the US and Asia, the US-China trade war, employee shortages, and the power grid problems that China is facing.

This semiconductor supply and demand crisis is affecting the global OLED industry. Some display makers cannot ship their displays - not because of OLED production problems, but because they cannot get enough driver ICs.

DSCC released its later OLED market forecasts, which now includes 2026. DSCC sees the rate of OLED market growth decelerating, with revenues reaching just over $60 billion in 2026.

Most of the growth in the next 5 years, according to DSCC, will come from new IT applications: OLED displays for monitors, laptops and tablets.

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