Disclosure Appears to Be Intended to Reassure Employees
Samsung Display announced on April 1 that the company’s QD-OLED panel yield has reached 75 percent.
It was unusual that the company disclosed its panel production yield. It unveiled its QD-OLED panel yield in an announcement posted on the company's internal bulletin board. The move appears to be intended to reassure the company's employees as controversy continues over its QD-OLED panel yield. Praising the employees for hard work, the company encouraged them to redouble efforts to boost the yield to 90 percent or higher in the near future.
Samsung Display began to ship QD-OLED panels from the Asan Campus in South Chungcheong Province in November 2021. Currently, it is processing 30,000 sheets of QD-OLED panels per month, a volume that can produce around 1 million units of 55- and 65-inch TVs per year.
The main clients for the company's QD-OLED monitors include Dell. It is also in talks with Asus, Lenovo, and HP. Its TV panel customers are Samsung Electronics and Sony.
Sony is expected to take the wraps off a QD-OLED TV model around June 2022, while Samsung Electronics' QD-OLED TVs are to be launched as early as this month. Previously, Samsung started receiving pre-orders for QD-OLED TVs through its U.S. subsidiary last month. The factory price is US$2,199.99 (about 2.65 million won) for a 55-inch model and US$2,999.99 (about 3.62 million won) for a 65-inch model.
Samsung Electronics plans to launch QD-OLED TV models in the United States first, and then release them in Asia, including Korea, and Europe. Although industry insiders predicted that Samsung Electronics would introduce QD-OLED TVs as a flagship product in the first half of 2022, an online Samsung global new TV model showcase held at the end of last month did not even mention QD-OLED TV models.
Industry watchers speculated that the reason might be Samsung Display's inability to supply a proper amount of panels to Samsung Electronics due to a low yield. They estimated Samsung Display’s QD-OLED panel yield at 50 percent.
In addition, some foreign media outlets, including “Tech Radar” in the U.S. and “Heise” in Germany, pointed out that QD-OLED displays do not express the black color properly in a brightly lightened environment and that their color representations were inaccurate due to their unique pixel arrangement.
For this reason, many industry experts judged that it was still too early to recommend products loaded with Samsung Display’s QD-OLED panels. They speculated that it was in this context that Samsung Electronics refrained from introducing QD-OLED TV models at the online showcase last month.
Under these circumstances, some employees at Samsung Display reportedly expressed concerns about the competitiveness of QD-OLED panels. The company apparently disclosed its QD-OLED panel yield to address these concerns.
“Although the yield announced by the company is higher than what was initially known, it is difficult to ensure profitability because large OLED panel market prices are low,” an industry insider said. “Samsung Display is unlikely to make additional investment in QD-OLED TVs for the time being as Samsung Electronics is not much interested in ramping up the share of QD-OLED TVs in its TV sales and it may adversely affect Samsung Display’s profits in the short term.”