Despite Slower Smartphone Growth, Corning Aims to Double Gorilla Glass Sales

Corning introduced Gorilla Glass cover glass for mobile devices in 2007, and today it’s used on more than 4.5 billion devices worldwide, Chief Strategy Officer Jeffrey Evenson told the Credit Suisse technology conference Tuesday. Gorilla is the “cover glass of choice” of more than 40 OEMs, Evenson said. Though the growth rate of smartphone shipments is slowing, Corning still thinks it can double its sales of Gorilla cover glass for smartphones “over the next few years in this category,” he said. “Beyond increasing high-end smartphone penetration and expansion of that market segment,” Corning sees “three options to drive sales growth,” he said. One is to migrate Gorilla Glass into new devices, and another is to “get more sales dollars per device by capturing a price premium, increasing the content per device, or both,” he said. A third option is “gaining share” in the category, he said. Improving the “performance and functionality” of Gorilla Glass “is key across the opportunity set,” he said. Corning’s fifth-generation Gorilla Glass “is much stronger at any given thickness than the previous generation,” he said. “We’ve been able to improve its durability without sacrificing its thinness and designers can also choose how they want to deploy this capability. They could choose to keep the same durability and move to thinner designs, or stay the same thickness and increase the drop performance.”