Market updates - Page 39

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CLSA says that as OLED displays are too expensive for many smartphone makers and lack enough differentiation to LCDs, the company is lowering its OLED adoption forecasts. CLSA now expects China's OLED smartphone shipments to total 116 million in 2018, 143 million in 2019 and 168 million in 2020. CLSA lowered its forecasts by 12-21%. In terms of penetration into the total Chinese smartphone market, CLSA sees 14% in 2018, 18% in 2019 and 21% in 2020.

Looking at the OLED makers, side, CLSA sees ample OLED supply in coming years, which means that expansion is likely to slow. CLSA assumed that OLED makers will achieve 70% yields and a utilization rate of 90%, which will bring all OLED makers to have a combined production capacity of around 288 million 6" panels in 2020. As demand will be only 168 million by Chinese phone makers (and remember there's also Samsung and LGD of course), this will create quite an oversupply situation in China. CLSA cuts its China OLED production forecasts by BOE, Tianma, Visionox, CSoT and Everdisplay by 23% to 26% in coming years.

IHS says that the foldable OLED market will grow from 200,000 units in 2018 to over 50 million units by 2025, taking up 6% of the total OLED market (825 million panels) and 11% of the total flexible OLED market (476 million).

IHS sees fast growth ahead for the market, but the analysts say that smartphone brands are cautious about launching foldable smartphones because the phones should be durable enough for repeated folding and thin and light enough even when supporting a larger display and battery.

BOE is ramping up its AMOLED production, and according to CLSA its target for the second half of 2018 is to produce 3 million panels. BOE is reportedly the supplier of AMOLED panels to Huawei's Mate 20 Pro smartphone, but CLSA says that the company is struggling to find customers from other smartphone makers.

According to CINNO, BOE produced around 1.7 million panels in the first half of 2018 - which means that it plans to almost double its shipments in the second half of the year.

LG Electronics said that it has sold over 3 million OLED TVs, since launching its first one in 2013 - in September 2018 it has shipped over 3.2 millionth units, in fact.

LG Display is increasing its production capacity quickly, and so LG Electronics can increase its TV shipments (although today there are over a dozen other companies that use LGD's OLED TV panels, including Sony, Philips, Panasonic and Toshiba). In 2018 alone LGD expects to sell a total of 2.9 million OLED TV panels (up from 1.7 million in 2017).

According to Korea's ETNews, SDC's rigid OLED production level has recovered fully in Q3 2018 and is now even higher than the production level in Q3 2017. Most of the new demand comes from China-based smartphone producers. ETNews says that SDC's A2 factory's utilization rates were over 90% in Q3 2018 (up from about 80% in Q3 2017).

Samsung's flexible OLED production has also recovered following new shipments to Apple's iPhone XS and XS Max, but the utilization rate in SDC's A3 flexible OLED fab is still lower than last year's.

Today we published new versions of our market reports - that cover the flexible, VR/AR, microdisplays, automotive, PMOLED and graphene OLED markets. OLED-Info provides comprehensive niche OLED market reports, and our reports cover everything you need to know about the niche market, and can be useful if you want to understand how the OLED industry works and what this technology can provide for your own industry. The reports are now updated to October 2018.

The OLED for VR/AR Market Report:

• Why OLEDs are adopted in almost all VR HMDs
• What kind of displays are required for VR and AR applications
• What the future holds for the VR and AR markets
• Current and future VR and AR systems

The report package provides a great introduction to the emerging VR and AR market, and details the role that OLED displays will have. Read more here!

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 states that following the launch of the first foldable OLED devices in 2019, the market is expected to experience a very fast growth - by 2022 the market will reach 63 million units, up from 3 million in 2019 (a CAGR of 173%). In terms of revenues, the market will reach $8.9 billion by 2022 (151% CAGR).

It is a bit confusing that DSCC segments this market by device type - as foldable OLEDs will probably merge these segments together (i.e. a phone/tablet, tablet/notebook, wearable/smartphone, etc).

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.