[The Korea Industry Post, April 1, 2016]
Samsung Display plans to stop operate its last small- and medium-sized LCD production facility called ‘L6’, as to further increase its potential to maintain supremacy in small- and medium-sized OLED display market.
▲Current status of Samsung Display's LCD production facility. /KIPOST
Korean display maker’s aggressive push seems a matter of course as current smart phone display trend is rapidly shifting to OLED due to its better color representation or color gamut, wider viewing angle, better contrast ratio, and faster pixel switching compared to LCD. With better picture quality, OLED recently undercut LCD on price.
From first quarter of the year, producing a 5-inch small- and medium-sized OLED display costs $14.3USD while LCD production costs $14.6USD.
Affordable cost with better performance are luring more and more smart phone makers like Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Vivo Communication Technology Co., Ltd., and OPPO of China to roll out their flagship smart phones built with Samsung Display’s OLED display. On the other hand, LCD displays are now tending to be adopted in low-end handsets.
The trend shift is favorable for Samsung Display, as it is currently taking 95% share of small- and medium-sized OLED display market.
LCD display panel makers are suffering from fierce competition over the decreasing demand. The situation is predicted to get worse.
A person familiar with the matter said “Samsung Display plans produce LCD display panel for TVs in its facilities named ‘L7’ and ‘L8’ located in Korea, and some other production facilities located in Suzhou, China. They will only produce OLED display panels for small- and medium-sized displays,” adding “The display maker seems to earn confidence that OLED will make it.”
by Brian Ahn
ahngija@kipost.net
translated by Taegeun Kim
ktg1130@kipost.net
April 11, 2016