Market updates - Page 27

BOE says that its current flexible OLED market share is around 20%. The company says that it plans to increase its market share to 40% by 2024 - and become the world's leader in flexible OLED production by then. BOE estimates that the flexible OLED market will generate $49.7 billion in revenues in 2024.

Earlier this month BOE announced that it shipped 16 million flexible OLEDs in the first half of 2020, and the company expects to ship over 40 million panels in the whole of 2020. BOE main problems currently lie with its Huawei account - the Chinese smartphone maker is expected to producing only 50 million smartphones in 2021 - down from 190 million in 2020. BOE hopes to recoup some of its Huawei orders by becoming an OLED supplier to Apple.

During the company's conference call, BOE says that it plans to ship over 40 million flexible OLED panels in 2020. In the first half of the year BOE shipped 16 million units, and it expects to ship over 24 million units in the second half.

This target means that BOE expects its shipments to rise over 130% from 2019 (it shipped around 17 million units, according to Omdia). This 40 million target is actual a sharp drop from BOE's plans at the end of 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic - to ship over 70 million panels.

UBI Research estimates that OLED smartphone display shipments reached 87 million units in Q2 2020 (down 23.1% compared to Q2 2019, and down 17% compared to Q1 2020).

The drop in rigid OLED smartphone display shipments was 40.3% from Q2 2019 to Q2 2020 - due to a drop in mid-tier smartphone production in China. Flexible OLED shipments actually rose 38% from last year as you can see in the chart below.

According to Omdia, Samsung Display has started to provide QD-OLED TV prototypes to potential customers - including Samsung Electronics, Sony and Panasonic. Samsung Display is on track to start mass production in Q3 2021.

Interestingly, Samsung Electronics is still not sure whether it will adopt QD-OLED TVs in 2021, as the company aims to focus on mini-LED panels in 2021, and may only release QD-OLED TVs in 2022.

According to reports from Korea, LG Electronics is seeing high demand for its 48-inch 4K CX OLED TVs - likely thanks to a high demand for stay-at-home entertainment during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

LG introduced the 48-inch OLED TV model in Korea towards the end of July, and pre-orders sold out "in one minute". In some countries in Europe, the model has gone out of stock in just one week after the launch. Apparently there's high demand from gamers who are looking for a high-quality mid-size gaming monitors. In the US, the 48-inch OLED CX is priced at $1,500 - and it out of stock at Amazon.com.

OLED-Info is proud to announce an important update to our OLED Microdisplay market report, which now adds a microLED microdisplay section. MicroLED technology shows great promise to enable extremely high-brightness and high-efficiency displays, but there are still challenges to overcome. The report now include details on all microLED microdisplay developers and includes more datasheets and product information - for both OLED and MicroLED microdisplays.

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DSCC updated its OLED material market forecasts, seeing a lower growth ahead. DSCC says the AMOLED stack material market will grow from $928 million in 2019 to $2.06 billion in 2024 in a CAGR of 17%. Only a couple of months ago DSCC estimated that the market in 2024 will reach $2.69 billion - and even these were reduced from earlier estimates due to COVID-19.

DSCC says that the main reason behind the reduction in its forecast is lower OLED TV capacity. The company now expects a slower ramp up at the Guangzhou fab, and LG's P-10 10.5-Gen fab is now removed from the forecast period.

Omdia (IHS Markit) updated its forecast for the 2020 OLED market - and the company now sees the market contracting 1.2%, to 465 million panels, as demand for high-end smartphones is falling.

In April 2020, Omdia saw an increase of 9% in demand for OLEDs - 512 million panels, up from 471 in 2019, even though it already forecasted a fall in demand for smartphone.

UBI Research estimates that Samsung Display's flexible OLED shipments to Chinese device makers will triple in 2020, and will reach 47 million units (up from 15.5 million in 2019). Rigid OLED shipments to China will drop from 135 million in 2019 to 110 million in 2020.

In total, SDC's flexible OLED panel production will reach 155.5 million in 2020, up 34% from 2019. This follows a couple of years of declining volumes (152 million in 2017, 129 million in 2018 and 116 million in 2019).

DSCC posted an interesting article detailing their estimates for the production costs and prices of choice flexible and foldable AMOLED displays, in China and in Korea.

We'll start with the chart above, which compares the prices and quotes of several flexible OLEDs produced by Samsung in Korea. DSCC says that as the profitability of Samsung's OLED business is highly dependent on fab utilization, it is currently losing money on this business as the yields in its flexible OLED lines are only 38% - and fixed costs such as personnel and depreciation cannot be decreased. Having said that, DSCC sees higher utilization in the next two quarters, which will result in profitability for SDC's OLED unit.