There's an interesting article over at JoongAng about component shortages for smartphones, and they discuss the supplies issues for AMOLED displays. Shim Jae-boo, a general manager at SMD, said that "until the summer of 2009, its sales employees had a hard time because of the lack of interest from the various buyers, leading to an emergency situation within the company".
In the beginning of 2010, things started to change as Samsung Electronics started to use AMOLED in their own phones: "Now our sales representatives are apologizing to our buyers for the lack of products to supply". Samsung expects that the new 5.5-Gen plant will begin mass producing in July 2011. The new plant will increase Samsung's AMOLED capacity ten-fold: from 3 million displays a month to 30 million.
