LG Display updated their OLED TV sales forecast to 2015 and 2016, stating that they now expect to sell between 400,000 and 500,000 OLED TVs in 2015 and a million TVs in 2016 - down from 600,000 TVs in 2015 and 1.5 million in 2016.
There are several reasons for LG's production cut - first of all LG sees a larger 65" TV (and 77") share then they expected - more people are buying 65" OLED TVs rather than 55" ones, which means that less TVs are being produced overall. The expect to see a further decline in the 55" OLED TV share - to 60% in 2016.
Comments
True, but:
A 65" TV has roughly 40% more area than a 55" TV. Hence to reach the same area than 600k 55" TVs you would need to produce ~428k 65" TVs. So unless they sell nearly 100% 65" TVs this year they will still fall well short of the overall area goal.
Not even mentioning the whopping expectation cut of 500k for next year...
But it's not just about size. Yields go down when you make larger panels, and also it's not exactly 40% because of substrate limitations. It may be that LG aims to sell more UHD panels (and not FHD ones) which also lowers yields.
Just to drive home a point, from the point of view of Universal Display's emitter sales, it's about coating glass and not the number of 55 inch televisions that matter. If they coat the same amount of glass to produce 600 fifty five inch televisions as they do to produce 400 sixty five inch televisions, all is well. The only point is that management over at UDC should be smart enough to tell that to the investor world