BOE Display - Page 18

GizChina reports that senior executives at Intel said that the company is looking at laptops with foldable OLED displays, working together with LG Display, Samsung Display, BOE and Sharp. There are many challenges to overcome, and Intel estimates that such foldable laptops will not arrive before 2021.

In October 2018 Samsung Electronics said that it is developing laptops with foldable displays, while other reports suggested that that LG Display is collaborating with Lenovo to develop a 13" foldable tablet.

We have added a new OLED panel to the OLED Marketplace, a BOE 0.95" 120x240 AMOLED that has a 4-Wire SPI interface and an embedded touch layer.

These new small AMOLED displays can be great for many applications - such as wearable or industrial devices. Check out more information over at the OLED Marketplace, or contact us now.

Last month Huawei launched its P30 and P30 Pro smartphones (with a 6.1" 1080x2340 AMOLED on the P30 and a 6.47" 1080x2340 AMOLED on the P30 Pro). Reports from China suggested that Huawei adopted SDC AMOLED for the P30 and BOE-made panels on the P30 Pro.

According to Anandtech, who posted an extensive review of the P30 and P30, the supplier for the smaller 6.1" AMOLED on the P30 is indeed Samsung Display, but Huawei uses both LG Display and BOE as suppliesr for the large 6.47" AMOLED on the P30 Pro.

DSCC says that OLED market revenues will grow from $26.5 billion in 2018 to $28.7 billion in 2019 and over $52 billion by 2023. The largest application will remain smartphone displays, but several other applications will generate over $1 billion in 2023 - TVs, tablets, notebooks and monitors. By area of production, TV displays will surpass smartphone displays in 2021.

Samsung is still (and will remain so) the dominant AMOLED display producer, even though its market share will drop from 97% in Q1 2018 to 81% in Q4 2019. In Q1 2019 Visionox surpassed LGD to become the 2nd largest AMOLED producer (but most of Visionox's panels are low-end 5.5-inch panels). DSCC expects LGD to regain its number 2 position in the second half of 2019. BOE is the third player and will remain so following its supply agreement with Huawei.

Market analysts from CLSA say that in 2018 BOE shipped 2.7 million flexible OLED displays to Huawei, its main customer. These were produced at BOE's Chengdu B7 6-Gen OLED fab, which has reached yields of over 75% (DSCC estimates that BOE's yields are around 50%).

CLSA says that BOE will soon start ramping the second phase of its B7 line, and the company expects to ship 30-50 million AMOLED panels in 2019. CLSA says that this is a highly aggressive target - and they believe actual shipments will only be 12.9 million in 2019.

Huawei adopted AMOLED displays in its P20 and P20 Pro smartphones, using panels produced by both BOE and LG Display. According to reports from China, the smartphone maker decided to adopt SDC's AMOLEDs in its updated smartphones, the P30 and P30 pro which will be launched soon.

We already reported that Samsung aims to increase its OLED production and to be more aggressive with its pricing. It seems as if this effort bears fruit. In addition it could be that Huawei was not satisfied with some of the LGD display quality issues being reported by P20 users.

ETNews reports that BOE has developed a new technology that integrates a touch layer inside a flexible OLED display (on touch) - a similar technology to Samsung's Y-OCTA. BOE is reportedly aiming to integrate the technology to its B11 production line in Miyangyang.

Y-OCTA panels are thinner than Samsung's previous flexible Add-On Touch panels - and the optical features are also better as the touch layer is below the polarizer. Samsung estimates that Y-OCTA also cuts production costs by around 30%.

In March 2017 OLED maker BOE Technology and OLED Microdisplay maker OLiGHTEK announced a new $170 million joint-venture to produce OLED microdisplays for the consumer VR and AR markets. US-based microdisplay-maker Kopin signed agreements with OLiGHTEK and with BOE's JV with OLiGHTEK for the production of its OLED microdisplays.

In August 2018 Korean ET News said that BOE is getting ready to start trial production in the new fab in early 2019. During Kopin's recent conference call, the company's CEO said that BOE's factory is "actually finished". All the equipment has been installed and the company is running first test runs and the first production samples should be produced in a few days, hopefully.

Huawei launched its first foldable smartphone, the Mate X with a glorious 8" 2200x2480 foldable AMOLED display that folds outwards. When closed, the phone operates as it has two displays - a 6.6" 1148x2480 on the front and a smaller 6.38" 2480x892 display on the back (which makes room for the cameras).

The Mate X specifications include 5G connectivity, a Kirin 980 octa-core chipset, 8 GB of RAM, 512 GB of storage, a NM memory slot and a quad camera setup with Leica optics.

DSCC released the interesting (but confusing, note the legend starts at 350M) chart below, detailing the market share of smartphone OLED producers in 2016-2019. As can be seen Samsung will remain the dominant producer, but its market share in 2019 will drop from 94% in 2018 to around 85%.

Non-SDC shipments will increase to 73 million units in 2019 - led by LG Display (~25 million units), BOE (around 20 million) and Visionox (around 15 million units).