IHS: flexible OLED capacity to almost double each year until 2020, leading to potential oversupply

IHS estimates that flexible OLED production capacity is set to increase from 1.5 million square meters to 20.1 million square meters between 2016 and 2020. That's a compound annual growth rate of 91%!

Mobile-application AMOLED capacity (2016-2020, IHS)

IHS says that almost all new small-sized displays OLED capacity added in the future will be used to produce flexible OLEDs, which will grow the market share of flexible OLEDs for mobile applications from 28% today to 80% by 2020. In the years between 2016 to 2020, OLED producers in China, Korea and Japan will build the equivalent of 46 new flexible AMOLED fabs (each with 30,000 monthly substrates).

One note of caution from IHS is that the market may not be able to actually absorb all this capacity - which means that the OLED market will experience an oversupply situation. In 2020 40% of the smartphones sold will use AMOLED panels. The main challenge to faster adoption will be the high cost of flexible OLED panels compares to LCDs.

Posted: Jul 26,2017 by Ron Mertens

Comments

With so much government involvement in the market (the agreement with the government in Meishan, China being one of a horde of examples), it's doubtful the industry could reasonably react if oversupply was imminent, as many of the decisions are being made by politicians and bureaucrats.