OLED-Info: the OLED experts

According to its plans, LG Display aims to ship around 2.9 million OLED TV panels in 2018, and the Korean panel maker expects that its production capacity expansion will allow it to ship around 4 million panels in 2019.

LGD's largest customer is LG Electronics, but the company is also enjoying strong sales to Japanese TV makers. The Nikkei Asian Review says that in 2018 the company will ship 500,000 panels to Sony and 200,000 to Panasonic, and next year it expects to increase its shipments to Sony to 850,000 units and to Panasonic to 300,000 units. LG Electronics OLED TV market share will be around 50-60% in 2019.

IHS says that OLED panels take up 61.1% of the total smartphone display market in Q3 2018, by revenues. OLED sales reached $6.6 billion in the quarter, out of a $10.7 billion market.

The leading OLED producer is still of course Samsung Display - which accounted for 93.3% of the total smartphone OLED panel market (and 94.2% of the flexible OLED panel market). Samsung's OLED dominance also helps it to enjoy a 57.8% market share in the total smartphone market (LCD+OLED) - far ahead of BOE (7.8%) and Tianma (7.7%) which are the 2nd and 3rd largest smartphone display producers.

In CES 2018 LG Electronics demonstrated its 65" rollable OLED TV prototype, showing how such a display can be used to create a TV that rolls into its base. Last month we reported that LG plans to showcase its rollable TV again at CES 2019, and now Bloomberg reports that LG aims to actually release this TV as a commercial product in 2019, citing "a person familiar with the matter".

It was already reported before that the rollable TV will take "center stage" in LG's CES event - which hinted that LG is indeed close to commercializing such a device. In 2017 LGD did say it plans to bring rollable OLED TVs to market by 2020.

According to Taiwan-based Topology Research Institute, Sony, Oculus and HTC will continue and dominate the VR market in 2019. Sony will continue to be the leading VR vendor, with sales of its HMD to grow 10% in 2019 to reach 2.2 million units.

The second largest will be Oculus Rift, which will see a surge of 80% in shipments to reach 1.7 million in 2019. HTC will also see a nice sales increase of 33% and the Topology expects HTC to ship 800,00 VR HMDs in 2019. In total, Topology expects the market to grow 29% to reach 6 million units in 2019.

OLED Korea is an international OLED-focused event, organized by UBI Research, and the OLED-Info team will attend next year's event, which will take place in Seoul, Korea in March 6-7, 2019.

UBI announced the final speaker list for the event, and it seems as if OLED Korea 2019 has a great lineup. We'll be happy to schedule meetings - so if you plan to attend OLED Korea 2019, do contact us!

Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) demonstrated two new OLED display prototype, both based on that company's proprietary CAAC-IGZO (c-axis aligned crystalline In-Ga-Zn-O) backplane material.

First up is the world's smallest 8K display, a 8.3" OLED (1058 PPI) with a resolution of 7680x4320. The panel is based on a white OLED with color filter architecture.

In July 2017 LG Display announced that it has decided to build a 8.5-Gen (2200x2500) OLED TV production line in Guangzhou. Following many delays, LGD got the approval for its new OLED TV fab from both the Korean and Chinese governments only in July 2018.

Korea ETNews now reports that LG Display started to install the production equipment in the Guangzhou fab. LG Display's new fab will have a capacity of 90,000 monthly 8.5-Gen substrates (2200x2500 mm), using two production lines. The equipment in the first line (with a capacity of 60,000 monthly substrates) was already installed, and LGD will soon (H1 2019) start ordering and installing the equipment in the second line as well.