According to Business Korea, Samsung Electronics is going to focus on mid-market LCD handsets in 2014, and in an effort to bring costs down they will adopt LCD panels in more phones. Samsung Display will reduce AMOLED production and increase LCD panel production. SDC was also asked to reduce OLED prices by "at least 10%".
The article says that the high-end smartphone market is saturated and Samsung wants to focus on emerging markets such as India and China. This can be a disturbing report for the OLED industry, but it doesn't have to be so. Samsung made it clear several times that it sees OLED as the future display technology, and it plans to adopt OLEDs in its high-end devices. It is putting a special emphasis on flexible displays - and in fact it sees flexible OLEDs adopted by 40% of their mobile phones by 2018.
In addition, more and more reports suggest that in 2014 Samsung will start adopting AMOLEDs in their high-end tablets. If this will be true than it's likely that even if more phones will adopt LCDs instead of OLEDs, SDC will in fact have to continue and increase their OLED capacity. We also expect Samsung to increase OLED TV production capacity and lower cost in 2014.
