LG Display’s board voted Friday to authorize spending 3.3 trillion South Korean won ($2.81 billion) to build new fabs in Paju, about 20 miles northwest of Seoul, for producing small and medium-sized OLED panels, said LGD in a 6-K filing Tuesday at the SEC. The investment will enable the LGD “to better respond to market demand,” it said. Construction is scheduled to begin this quarter and continue until Q1 2024, but the start of production will depend on “market conditions” and LGD’s “internal schedule,” it said. LGD is configuring the Paju fabs for Gen 6 panels targeted at laptops and tablets, emailed Display Supply Chain Consultants co-founder Bob O'Brien.
OLED TVs’ share of advanced TV shipments soared to 40% globally in Q2, from 25% in the year-earlier quarter, reported Display Supply Chain Consultants Monday. DSCC defines advanced sets as including all OLED TVs, plus LCD TVs with premium technology features such as 8K or quantum dots. It attributed the surge to additional OLED TV panel capacity at LG Display’s Guangzhou, China, fab, plus rising LCD TV panel prices that helped OLED TV regain share competitively in the premium TV category after declining in 2018-2020. DSCC estimates OLED TV shipments increased 169% year over year in Q2, while advanced LCD TV shipments jumped only 36%.
Development of organic vapor jet printing, Universal Display Corp.’s “novel manufacturing process” for maskless, dry, direct printing of full-color, large-screen OLEDs, is on pace for its first major commercial “milestone” as an “alpha system build” in 2022, said CEO Steve Abramson on a Q2 call Thursday. “We believe that OVJP has a potential to revolutionize the manufacturing of OLED TV panels.”
TCL is skewing to mid- to high-end lines to “optimize the product and channel structure, and promote the steady improvement of operating performance,” said the company in its first-half 2021 earnings report Friday. In response to rising screen costs, the company raised TV prices in the China market, with average selling price (ASP) of a TCL smart TV jumping 76% year on year in the period. The company bowed more large-screen models, with sales of QLED TVs growing 62% year on year. The average size of TCL smart TVs grew by 2.6 inches to 52.5 inches, it said. In the first half, it launched the X12 8K Mini LED smart TV, C12 QLED Mini LED smart TV and 20 series mobile phones. Noting continued tight supply and demand for TV panels, the company said it shipped 11.27 million smart TVs in first half, a year-on-year increase of 11.8%.
Display Supply Chain Consultants is sticking with previous forecasts that LCD TV prices, having peaked in July, “will decline for the rest of the year,” reported the analytics company Monday. The pandemic-fueled consumer TV demand surge “has eased and industry supply has caught up to demand,” said DSCC. Even with the projected second-half declines, TV prices at year’s end will remain higher than they were in December and “dramatically higher than their all-time lows,” it said.
Amazon and Best Buy will partner on a new lineup of Insignia F50-series of Fire TVs with quantum-dot QLED 4K video, Dolby Vision, DTS Virtual-X and Alexa voice control, said the companies Tuesday. The sets will be available at Best Buy stores and online and at Amazon.com later in the summer, they said. BestBuy.com featured four Insignia F50 models Tuesday as “coming soon,” in screen sizes between 50 and 70 inches, priced from $599 to $899. Amazon and Best Buy began their Insignia-Fire TV collaboration three years ago.
Display-only video monitors and projectors should be exempt from FCC user-interface rules if they don’t render audio, said the Information Technology Industry Council in a call Tuesday with Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau and Wireless Bureau staff, per a filing posted Friday in docket 21-140. ITI was represented among others by Senior Policy Counsel Joel Miller, former Commissioner Mike O’Rielly’s chief of staff when O’Rielly was at the agency. Miller left the FCC in early 2021 and was hired by ITI in May. Display-only monitors and projectors “do not possess the hardware or firmware needed to produce audio feedback,” the filing said. Requiring the devices to produce audio could effectively eliminate display-only devices, the group said: Changing the construction of such monitors to comply with user-interface rules would require additional chips, which are in a shortage. So manufacturers would need more time to comply.
Shipments of foldable displays for smartphones and notebook PCs will grow from 9.3 million units this year to 61.7 million in 2028, Omdia emailed Wednesday. Foldables' share of the segment will increase from 2.3% to 9.6%, it said. The 6.x-inch class will be the mainstream size for clamshell-type smartphones through 2028 due to its “attractive, compact design and relatively affordable price,” said the research firm. Low-temperature polycrystalline oxide will be the mainstream backplane technology for manufacturing foldable displays due to its lower power consumption, but LTPS will remain the alternative because of its cost advantage, Omdia said.
Corning created a new DX category of scratch- and shatter-resistant Gorilla Glass composite products for smartphone camera lens covers, enabling “professional-grade image capture,” it said Thursday. Antireflective coatings have been used on conventional cameras for a long time to improve light capture, but they can scratch easily, said Corning. The new composites give smartphone camera lens covers enhanced scratch resistance and durability compared with antireflective coatings, plus they boost the “optical performance required for these devices,” it said. Samsung will be the first smartphone OEM to adopt the new composites, it said.
June’s consumer price index for TVs exceeded the overall U.S. economy’s CPI for the first time in the measurement's 40-year history, as TV prices increased 8% compared with June 2020, reported Display Supply Chain Consultants Monday. “The increase in LCD TV panel prices has led to an unprecedented increase in TV prices in the U.S.,” said DSCC. It estimates LCD TV panel prices in June averaged 102% higher than in June 2020.