Korean OLEDs
Leading Chinese cell phone makers such as Huawei and Xiaomi will launch smartphones with OLED screens in great numbers next year. According to industrial sources on Nov. 9, Huawei and Xiaomi, among others, are sounding out LG Display about buying OLED panels for smartphones.
In particular, Huawei launched OLED smartphones based on five inch full-HD panels supplied by Samsung Display. The company is considering using products from LG Display in a process to ramp up its OLED smartphone lineup next year. Huawei buys more than 1 trillion won (US$865 million) worth of parts from Korean electronics companies a year.
Xiaomi, with a strong partnership with LG Display, will use LG Display’s panels in its next OLED smartphones. Previously, LG Display supplied LCD panels to Xiaomi for its strategic smartphone product group and LCD panels to the company for its 55-inch TV lineup.
Samsung Display has Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest mobile product firm, as its largest corporate customer. The company has been successfully securing Chinese companies since last year.
In March 2014, the company supplied full-HD OLED panels to Gionee first and then to Vivo, Oppo and Lenovo. This year, big corporate customers such as Huawei, ZTE and Meizu began to place orders with LG Display as large corporate customers.
Most of their products are loaded with HD or better displays. In the case of Gionee, the company used QHD (2560×1440) OLED panels for the first time as a Chinese company. Samsung Display, with a share of over 90 percent in the market of OLED panels for mobile devices, is straining to widen the scope of OLED panels, going beyond resting on its laurels in the area of supplying products to current smartphone companies.
In particular, in the VR device market, leading companies such as Oculus and Sony chose OLED displays, making OLED displays a de-facto industrial standard. According to industrial sources, numerous VR companies in China are adopting Samsung Display’s OLED panels as basic parts for their products. On the other hand, companies in Chinese-speaking regions are gradually entering the mobile OLED market.
Various companies such as Ever Display, AUO, BOE, CSOT and Tianma are investing in AMOLED panels. It is said that some Chinese companies such as Ever Display recently finished its preparations to mass-produce small and mid-sized AMOLED panels via their investment that began several years ago.