ETNews says that Apple chose Samsung Display as the company's primary OLED supplier, and the two companies signed an official contract. Flexible OLED supply for Apple's next iPhone will begin in 2017.
ETNews further claims that other display makers are fighting to become Apple's second OLED supplier. There's a high chance that LG Display will be chosen, but the company has not yet been able to secure enough production capacity. Sharp/Foxconn and Japan Display are competing with LGD for Apple's OLED business.
According to the report, SDC will produce between 50% to 80% of Apple's OLED screens. The rest will have to produced by Apple's 2nd supplier - and currently no one besides SDC is mass producing flexible OLEDs (LGD is producing such displays, but at a much lower volume).
ETNews says that SDC agreed to supply 60,000 flexible OLED panels per month this year to Apple - but this number seems very low and is probably wrong. If ETNews means 60,000 monthly susbtrates - than this seems too high. Samsung is currently producing around 9 million flexible OLEDs each month to satisfy demand for the Galaxy S7 edge and its other flexible OLED products.
Samsung recently decided to double the capacity of its A3 flexible OLED line - the company placed orders worth around $325 million to increase capacity from 15,000 monthly substrates to 30,000. Samsung hopes the new capacity will be ready by early 2017.
Comments
Yup.
So Apple is doing what they always do: tell their faithful that their current technology is the best and their competitors use is inferior until the day they adopt that technology and immediately reverse their dogma with their buyers following in line.