LG Display to stop investing in small OLEDs and focus on large panels, plans 55" OLED TVs in 2012

LG Display's CEO (Kwon Young-soo) says that the company decided to stop investing in small/medium sized OLED panels. The company will focus on their AH-IPS (Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching) LCDs instead - which are more profitable and also has less flows then LGD's OLEDs (update: Kwon Young-soon thinks that Samsung are misleading the public because their OLEDs aren't good enough).

LGD will probably still produce AMOLEDs in the recently opened Gen-4.5 plant (they are already supplying panels to Nokia) - but it seems that LGD will not expand the monthly capacity to 12,000 as planned (currently they make 4,000 substrates a month).

LGD will now concentrate on large OLEDs, and the plan is to launch a 55" OLED TV by the second half of 2012. Production volume will be small at first (tens of thousands of units), but this will be expanded to mass production (the company will 'observe the market reaction' first). Update: there are already some rumors that Apple will buy those panels and produce their own Apple OLED TV...

LG 31-inch OLED TV prototypeLG 31-inch OLED TV prototype

This is not entirely surprising. LGD already decided to skip Gen-5.5 and go straight to Gen-8 to produce OLED TVs - indeed there were reports that the company plans to start building a pilot line soon. According to earlier reports, LG plans to fabricate white OLEDs with color filters (this technology was developed at Kodak) - and not 'true OLED' that uses color OLED subpixels.

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Posted: Jul 22,2011 by Ron Mertens