January 2023

Samsung Electronics reported its financial results for Q4 2022, with revenues of $57.3 billion, and an operating profit of $3.5 billion.

Samsung says that the "business environment deteriorated significantly in the fourth quarter due to weak demand amid a global economic slowdown". SDC's mobile AMOLED panel business earning declined, as demand for smartphones fell, but its large-area panel business seen a smaller loss as it is increasing sales of QD-OLED panels.

According to DSCC, display fab utilization started to decline in Q2 2022, and this continued - and bottomed out towards the end of 2022. The industry is starting to recover, but the recovery is slower than expected before.

This is true for both LCD and OLED displays, as you can see in the graph above.

According to reports from Korea, LGD is now applying MLA to its gaming monitors, as it sees the growing gaming market as an important one for its future growth.

Industrial inkjet printing developer Notion Systems announced that is has been selected by the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICASS) for organic material R&D. Notion Systems worked together with its partner YixinTech as its system went through a long comparison against other inkjet printers in the market.

ICCAS is a multi-disciplinary research institute dedicated to basic research in broad fields of chemical sciences. One of its major research areas is organic materials for display applications.

LG Display reports its financial results for Q4 2022, with an operating loss of around $710 million USD (down from a profit of $350 million in Q4 2021). The company says that high inflation and interest rates reduce consumer demand and it sees weak demand and falling prices for both OLED and LCD displays.

LGD says that LCD prices are at an all time low, and the company will accelerate its plans to wind-down its LCD production. During the quarter, the portion of OLED displays out of its total revenues have risen over 50% for the first time. LG Display will also adjust its utilization rate at its OLED TV factories to meet the lower demand.

Earlier this month LG Electronics introduced its 2023 Gram laptop series, that all come with OLED displays. According to the latest update from Korea, these new laptops use displays produced by Samsung Display.

This is the first time that Samsung provides AMOLED displays to LG Electronics. These are rigid OLEDs. LG Display does not produce such displays, it is making only flexible OLED panels.

Samsung Display announced that it is beginning to produce touch-enabled OLED displays for the laptop market. These panels will adopt the company's latest OCTA (on-cell touch) technology, and will support a 120Hz refresh rate and will offer a 3K resolution (the company did not detail the size).

Samsung says that the first laptops to adopt the new panels will be Samsung's own 2023 Galaxxy Book notebooks, but the panels will also be offered to other laptop makers.

As we reported a few days ago, The Korean government has officially designated five display technologies as "national strategic technologies", which gives tax breaks to display makers and developers.

The five display technologies include three specific display technologies - AMOLED, microLEDs and QD displays, in addition to deposition technologies materials and TFT equipment and materials. As strategic technologies, the government gives generous (30-50%, depending on the company size) tax credits for R&D and 8-16% tax credits for building production lines for materials, equipment or displays. The government is also considering increasing the tax credits for production lines up to 25%.

Korea-based ETNews reports that Apple has finally committed to adopt OLED displays in future tablets and laptops, and the company has signed a contact with a "local OLED developer" (which means either Samsung Display or LG Dispaly) to develop four different OLED displays.

According to the report, Apple decided to adopt a 10.86" and 12.9" AMOLED displays for future iPad devices, and 14" and 16" displays for future MacBooks. The first OLED iPad will be released in 2024, while the first OLED MacBook will come later in 2026.