IHS analyst David Hsieh posted a very interesting article that discuss the global OLED industry with a special focus on China. Samsung is expected to retain its lead in this market - and will more than double its capacity between 2017 to 2022.

In five years (2022), Samsung will have a capacity to produce 16.6 million square meters of RGB OLED displays, or 52% of the global capacity. SDC will be followed by LG Display (11%), Tianma (6%), CSoT (5%), Visionox (4%) and EverDisplay (4%).

IHS says that SDC increased its lead in the smartphone display market, reaching a market share of 42.7% in Q3 2017. Samsung is followed by JDI (12.5%), LG Display (10.1%), BOE (8.8%) and Sharp (7.7%). The smartphone display market totaled $11.8 billion in Q3, a new quarterly high.

IHS says that OLED smartphone revenue reached a record high in the quarter - $5.11 billion (up 32.4% from the $3.86 billion in Q2 2017). SDC's market share in the OLED smartphone display market is 98.5% ($5.03 billion). IHS actually expects SDC's market share to increase slightly to 98.8% in Q4 2017.

In December 2016 China-based AMOLED producer Everdisplay officially launched production of its upcoming $4.1 billion 6-Gen AMOLED factory in Shanghai, China. Everdisplay's new fab construction is progressing, and EDO today held a ceremony noting that the company finished the building's main steel plant roof frame.

EDO's new fab will be able to produce 30,000 monthly substrates (1500 x 1850 mm) and will be used to produce small and medium sized flexible AMOLEDs (1 to 15 inch). EDO aims to begin installing equipment in August 2018 with trial production beginning in January 2019 and mass production in 2021.

Universal Display announced that China-based AMOLED producer Everdisplay (EDO) has signed an OLED evaluation agreement. As per the agreement, UDC will supply EDO with phosphorescent OLED materials to be used in EDO's displays.

Everdisplay actually started mass producing AMOLED displays towards the end of 2014 in a 4.5-Gen line with a monthly capacity of 20,000 substrates. The company is currently producing both small AMOLEDs for wearable devices and larger smartphone displays. EDO is also developing flexible OLEDs, transparent OLEDs and OLEDs for VR and automotive applications. EDO's current OLED displays can be found in the OLED Marketplace.

China-based EverDisplay demonstrated several new AMOLED prototype displays at CES Asia 2017. First up are the company's latest flexible OLEDs which are 5.5" in size with a FHD (1920x1080, 402 PPI) resolution and a curvature radius of 20 mm. The whole panel si just 0.3 mm in thickness.

EverDisplay is also showing the same panels in an edge-type mobile phone configuration. Everdisplay shows how its displays can be used to create phones that are almost completely (91%) covered with a display.

Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) released some very interesting information regarding the mobile OLED market from its recent OLED market report by Yoshio Tamura and Ross Young. DSCC expects mobile AMOLED demand to grow from almost 400 million panels in 2016 to almost 1.2 billion in 2021.

Samsung Electronics, who's already using AMOLED displays in almost 80% of its smartphones will not increase its AMOLED orders by a lot, but shipments will grow dramatically to other players led by Apple, Huawei and Oppo.

According to Digitimes Research, OLED display makers in China will increase their total annual capacity from 272,000 m² in 2016 to 7.86 million m² in 2020 - a CAGR or 131.9%.

The largest producer in 2020 will be BOE Display (35% of the Chinese OLED market), followed by Tianma (17.6%), Visionox (14%), Everdisplay (11.6%), CSoT (9.5%), Truly (7.8%) and Royole (4.5%).

We spent last week visiting China - mostly around Shanghai. We attended the Printed & Flexible Electronics China 2017 conference, visited both EverDisplay and Visionox to learn more about their OLED products and plans, and also went to Wuxi to see the interesting and quite impressive graphene center over there.

Samsung Display and LG Display are the clear leaders in AMOLED production - for almost 10 years now. But the market is now changing as several new players, mostly in China, are starting to commercially produce AMOLED displays - mostly for mobile phones, wearables and VR headsets.

IHS says that combine OLED shipments from all active Chinese OLED makers reached over a 1.4 million panels in Q3 2016 . This is still small relative to Samsung's capacity (which made around 70 million panels in the quarter) but a step forward for these companies.

IHS says that strong demand from Chinese smartphone brands (see chart above), mostly Oppo and Vivo boosted the demand for AMOLED displays. Coupled with the reported supply shortage at SDC this created an opportunity for the new OLED makers based in China. In Q2 2016 these Chinese OLED makers produced around 600,000 panels (so production more than doubled in the quarter.

A few months ago we reported that China-based AMOLED producer Everdisplay is planning to invest $4.1 billion USD to build a 6-Gen AMOLED factory. Today the company launched this new AMOLED fab officially in a ceremony in Shanghai, China.

On December 9th Everdisplay started constructing the new fab in the Jinshan Industrial Zone in Shanghai. Investment in the new fab, according to EverDisplay, will actually be 27.2 billion yuan - or almost $4 billion USD. The fab will be able to produce 30,000 monthly substrates (1500 x 1850 mm) and will be used to produce small and medium sized flexible AMOLEDs (1 to 15 inch).