Samsung Electronics reported their financial results for Q1 2014. The company had sales of almost $52 billion, and made a profit of $8.2 billion. This was less than a year ago, and the company says this is mostly due to lower high-end smartphone and display sales.
Samsung Electronics says that OLED sales were down due to weak seasonal demand and "impact from new product model replacement" (whatever that means). Looking to the future, Samsung expects to increase OLED shipments to high-end smartphones and to expand to mid-end phones as well. They also want to increase applications to wearable devices. Interestingly they do not mention OLED tablets.
In a different report, we heard that Samsung announced its 2014 TV lineup in Australia. The company puts a lot of focus on curved LCD displays - and did not even mention their OLED TVs. We heard some speculation that Samsung is withdrawing from the OLED TV market, but I find that hard to believe. I think this is just a setback and I cannot imagine the Korean company making the same mistake Sony and other Japanese makers did years ago when they failed to enter the flat panel market in time.
Comments
Maybe you're right. But production of the 5.1" panels for the GS5 started well in advance of the phone introduction, so it shouldn't mean lower OLED sales for SDC, should it?
I'm guessing SE ordered millions of panels in advance.
"impact from new product model replacement" probably refers to the introduction of the GS5 in April. So less people will have had interest in buying the GS4 in Q1 and therefore SAMSUNG might even have lowered the prices of GS4 (?)