September 2018

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.

DisplayMate has posted a comprehensive review of the Apple iPhone XS Max display - a 6.5" 1242x2688 AMOLED display. DisplayMate has found that this display is highly impressive - with a close to text-book perfect calibration and performance. The display has been found to be on par with the Galaxy S9 and Note 9 display.

The high performance display led us to ask DisplayMate's Raymond Soneira about the producer of this display - and he confirms our estimation - the iPhone XS Max's display was produced by Samsung Display. In the past months we have heard many reports claiming that Apple contracted LG Display to produce this 6.5" AMOLED, and now we have proof that eventually Apple chose to keep Samsung as its exclusive supplier for Smartphone AMOLEDs, at least for now.

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.

Market research company Newzoo has started to track the OLED smartphone market, and the company's analysts say that over a billion smartphones with OLED displays have been shipped - up from 720 million in July 2016. OLED is the display of choice for high-end smartphones, and OLED displays take up 30.4% of the total smartphone display market (up from 26.2% in June 2016).

Looking at smartphone brands, NewZoo says that Samsung accounts for 70.5% of the market (smartphones with OLED displays, that is) - down from 87% in July 2016. Samsung is followed by Oppo (9%), Vivo (9% as well) and Apple (around 5%).

Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) estimates that a 6" flexible OLED Module (with a touch layer) costs around $78 (and will drop slightly to $76 by the end of the year). Meanwhile the price of a similar rigid OLED is around $26 and an LTPS LCD is around $16.

LCD producers have lowered the prices dramatically in the last two years (from $29 in early 2017 to $16 today), and rigid OLED producers have been forced the lower their prices as well (from $42 in early 2017 to $26 today).

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.

In 2015, the EU launched the €4.4 million Flexolighting project (led by Brunel University London) with an aim to develop new materials, processes and methods to overcome current OLED lighting challenges - including lifetime, lighting uniformity and more.

The project's consortium announced that following the project completion and a rethinking of the complete OLED supply chain, it believes that high efficiency OLED lighting panels can be produced at a cost that is on a similar level with LED lighting.

Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) updated its display equipment spending forecasts, and the company now expects OLED spending to recover only in 2022. In June 2018, DSCC estimated that the OLED equipment market will start to recover in 2020.

DSCC says that the whole display market is currently saturated after unprecedented equipment spending in 2016-2018 (an average of $22 billion per year for both LCDs and OLEDs) - for both mobile display and TV display production. Display production is expected to grow at 10% per year from 2018-2020 (as a result of the equipment orders in 2016-2018), and combined with lower operation margins and losses in the display market are causing display makers to be cautious with new capacity plans.