When Foxconn acquired a majority stake in Sharp for $3.5 billion, it was reported that Foxconn aims to invest a total of $1.8 billion in OLED technologies, as Foxconn aims to become an OLED supplier to Apple. In June 2016 Foxconn's president said that the company aims to start mass producing OLEDs as early as 2017, but this was way too optimistic - production will probably start at 2018 or even 2019.
An interesting article in Business Korea states that both LG Display and Samsung Display are not very worried about this competition from Japan. LG Display estimates that actually mass producing flexible OLEDs will not be as easy as Sharp hopes - and that the Japanese maker will not be able to compete with flexible OLEDs by at least 2019 or possibly 2020.
Samsung Display says that the reports from Japan are still "just press releases" and that there's nothing to actually discuss at this stage.
The Korean companies may be overly confident - but it is true that it took both LG and Samsung many years and massive investments in R&D and production technologies to get to the point of flexible OLED mass production, and they estimate that this will also be the case for Sharp and other competitors from Taiwan and China.
