Business Korea reports that Sharp will withdraw from the smartphone OLED market. Sharp started producing OLEDs in low volume in August 2018, and Business Korea quotes IHS saying that Sharp understands it cannot compete with Korean and Chinese companies with both technology and price.
Business Korea says that Sharp produced a total of 60,000 smartphone OLED panels - 6.2" 1440x2992 flexible notch-type AMOLEDs that were adopted in Sharp's own Aquos Zero phone. Sharp has already stopped production last month. It is not clear if Sharp will still continue to produce OLEDs for other applications (automotive perhaps?) or will it withdraw from all production.
Sharp was very late to the OLED industry, even though it developed the technology for many years and this is a rather sad ending if true. In January 2018 Sharp's CEO announced that Sharp aims to begin commercial production of flexible OLED displays for its own smartphones in Q1 2018. Sharp's OLED displays were being produced at the company's 4.5-Gen Taki plant which has been converted (partially) to OLED production.
Sharp recently demonstrated a 6.18" 1440x3040 foldable AMOLED prototype, but this will likely not see the light of day.
