MicroLED has “great promise” as a display technology, “but it’s going to take a while for it to achieve volume production,” Bob O’Brien, president of Display Supply Chain Consultants, told an LEDs Magazine webinar Thursday. MicroLED is expected to have three to four times the power efficiency of OLED, he said. “For portable displays, this is especially important,” he said. MicroLED’s peak-brightness performance also will give it a big advantage over OLED in a “TV-like application,” he said. But bringing microLED displays to market is “a big challenge,” he said. Achieving the “chip transfer from an LED wafer onto a backplate” is among the biggest hurdles to commercializing the technology, he said. Smartwatches are likely to be the first commercial applications of microLED displays, he said. That’s where “you can leverage that power consumption value into a significantly better device,” he said.

IDTechEx values the global OLED display market at $25.5 billion this year, rising 20 percent to $30.7 billion in 2019, it reported Wednesday. OLED displays used in mobile devices generate about 88 percent of market revenue, followed by displays for OLED TVs, at 8 percent, it said. Wearables, the third largest OLED application, are 2 percent of market revenue, it said.

Demand is “burgeoning” for super-large TV panels exceeding 60 inches, with annual shipments expected to nearly quadruple in 10 years, after first topping 10 million units only two years ago, reported IHS Markit Thursday. Annual shipments of 60-inch and larger TV panels, including LCD and OLED, are forecast to exceed 20 million units in 2018 and to reach 54 million units in 2025, or 19 percent of the entire TV panel demand: “Their combined share by shipment area is projected to almost triple to 33 percent in 2025 from 12 percent in 2016.” The increasing investment in Gen 10.5 fabs, which are optimized to produce 65- and 75-inch TV panels in profitable “scale,” is the main driver in the super-large panel segment, said IHS. As production and supply-chain costs decline as a result of more Gen 10.5 fabs coming online, so, too, will TV prices, it said.

Large thin-film transistor LCD panel shipments set record monthly highs in July in terms of units and area, reported IHS Markit Wednesday. Unit shipments increased 10 percent year-on-year to 64.3 million units, while area shipments jumped 19 percent to 17 million square meters, said IHS. Production at new Chinese LCD display fabs, including the Gen 10.5 plant that BOE is collocating with the Corning glass factory in Hefei (see 1805100002), has increased since Q2, it said. “Despite the growing production, panel makers have maintained the utilization rate and instead tried to push out panel shipments by lowering panel prices in the first half of 2018. That’s one of the reasons that panel shipments are continuously growing.” BOE led the large TFT LCD market in July in terms of unit shipments with a 24 percent share, followed by LG Display with 19 percent, said IHS. In terms of area shipments, LG Display continued to lead with a 20 percent share, followed by BOE with 18 percent, it said.

Next-generation light-field, multi-planar, volumetric and holographic displays are among areas for which Insight Media is seeking presentation abstracts for the Display Summit it’s producing Oct. 2-3 at Harman International headquarters in Northridge, California, said the company Monday. “Key questions” the summit will explore include the possible near- and long-term consumer potential of next-gen display technologies, including whether multi-planar and light-field displays can find a home in augmented- and virtual-reality devices, it said.

OLED technology and materials supplier Universal Display expects the “long-awaited introduction” of the world's first foldable OLED smartphones to come next year, said CEO Steve Abramson on a Thursday earnings call. Their debut will “pave the cutting-edge and innovative form-factor path” for portable to foldable to rollable OLED, “exciting and enlarging the consumer electronics industry with new applications and new markets,” he said. Though Universal’s “top three” panel-maker customers, BOE, Samsung Display and LG Display, “are all working on flexible substrates,” Abramson expects Samsung will be one of the early market leaders in foldable OLED products, he said, citing last month’s Samsung Display announcement that its “unbreakable flexible” smartphone panel was “officially verified” in UL durability and drop tests. Corning CEO Wendell Weeks was significantly more pessimistic on an earnings call last month, saying no cover materials yet exist for a “truly” foldable smartphone (see 1807250008). Display Supply Chain Consultants CEO Ross Young recently agreed, telling a June webinar that technical challenges abound in commercializing foldable displays that are robust enough to withstand the “strain and stress” of repeated foldings (see 1806120029). Universal thinks it’s making “excellent” progress “in our ongoing development work for a commercial phosphorescent blue emissive system" that all its OLED panel-making customers “are waiting for,” said Abramson. As has been Abramson's custom on recent calls and at investor conferences, he declined in Q&A to speak more specifically about Universal's progress in blue. “We haven't disclosed specs on blue for quite some time,” he said. “We're making significant progress” in perfecting emissive-blue’s “color-point efficiency and lifetime, all in one device, and we believe we are significantly ahead of anybody else,” he said. Universal plans next month to install a “pilot prototype system” for the organic vapor-jet printing technology it’s developing to enable the more cost-efficient production of large-screen OLED TV displays, said Abramson: “We are making advancements with this novel mask-less, solvent-less dry direct printing technology.”

With industry competition expected to “worsen” in TV screen sizes 65 inches and larger, Samsung Electronics wants to “actually move away from the existing capacity competition and focus more on quality rather than scale,” said Kyung Chull Park, vice president of Samsung’s visual display sales and marketing team, in a Korean-to-English translation of a Monday earnings call. In the mid to long term, “this means that we are looking into various technologies for the large TV segment,” and a quantum dot-OLED hybrid “is one of many technologies we are currently considering and researching and developing to meet the more sophisticated customer needs,” he said. In looking at “various technologies as candidates,” Samsung will “continue to closely collaborate with customers so that we are able to deliver products that satisfy customer need on a timely basis,” he said. Commercial customers are able now to order, on a “reservation” basis, the Wall, the microLED display product that Samsung showcased at CES. Wider-scale production will begin in October. For the “home entertainment version” of microLED displays, “we're currently targeting the product launch for first half of next year,” the executive said. “It will be a slimmer version than what you can see currently.” Samsung’s plan will be to launch microLED products “at a price range” that consumers can “accept” and will be “viewed as a reasonable price range,” he said.

Huawei is seeking to beat Samsung to market with the world’s first foldable smartphone using displays sourced from Chinese panel maker BOE, Nikkei reported. Huawei and Samsung representatives didn’t comment. Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu is scheduled to keynote IFA Aug. 31 in Berlin. BOE is partnering on a Gen 10.5 LCD display fab in Hefei, China, with Corning, which Wednesday told analysts that display cover materials don’t yet exist for foldable smartphones that would be sufficiently bendable and durable (see 1807250063 or 1807250008).

LCD panel prices will stabilize this quarter, due to a production scale back of 32-, 40- and 43-inch panels, but longer term, panels will remain in oversupply, leading to a restructuring of older TFT LCD fabs, said a Thursday IHS Markit report. Planned new factories will bump up large display panel production capacity 31 percent -- roughly 836 million square feet -- from 2018 to 2021, about 527 million more square feet of capacity than the market will require, said the researcher. The supply-demand glut level is forecast to widen from 12 percent in 2018 to 23 percent in 2021, remaining above the 10 percent level considered to define a balanced market. From 2019 to 2021, LCD TV panel capacity will increase, largely from Gen 10.5 and 11 factories in China, said IHS. “Some panel makers may be forced to reduce utilization rates, while some planned capacity may never be built,” said analyst David Hsieh. For the industry to return to more balanced supply and demand, multiple Gen 5, 6 and 8 factories will likely need to be shut down, he said.

MicroLED displays have the potential to become a $71 billion market opportunity by 2027, based on a 65 percent compound annual growth rate, if the industry can overcome an abundance of technical and supply-chain obstacles, said a report Insight Media is distributing for n-tech Research, which did the study. The report sees backlighting and near-eye applications for virtual-reality headsets as being among the displays’ first practical commercial uses. MicroLED displays fit the bill for VR headsets because of their high brightness and ultra-high resolution, said the report. Other benefits of microLED displays include their ability to consume only half the power of OLED screens with double the light efficiency, it said. In addition to the challenges of scaling production for acceptable factory yields, supply-chain logistics are a “big unknown,” because existing liquid-crystal display fabs can’t “satisfy” the requirements of microLED display manufacturing, it said.