OLED Smartphones - introduction and industry news

According to DSCC, the foldable smartphone display market has declined for the first time in Q3 2024, and the company sees the market entering a flat state in 2024 and 2025. The market has grown fast (at least 40% per year) since 2019, but according to DSCC it will grow only 5% in 2025 and will decline by 4% in 2025. Demand will remain stable at around 22 million units per year.

DSCC says that Samsung is seeing slower than expected demand for its Galaxy Z Flip 6 smartphone, around 10% lower than the Z Flip 5 released in 2023. Almost all of Samsung's demand is in the Korean and Europrean markets. Huawei has also placed lower than expected orders for foldable OLEDs for the second half of 2024, due to the late introduction of the Mate X6 and Pocket 3 devices compared to the 2023 launch dates. The demand for its tri-foldable Mate XT is lower than expected as well. 

Huawei announced several new devices yesterday, all with AMOLED displays. We'll start with the Mate X6, a foldable smartphone that offers a 7.93" 120Hz 2240x2440 foldable LTPO AMOLED display, and a 6.45" 120Hz 1080x2440 LTPO AMOLED cover display.

Second is Huawei's new Mate 70 smartphone family, with 3 models. The basic Mate 70 has a 6.7" 2500 nits 120Hz 1216x2688 LTPO AMOLED display, while the 70 Pro and 70 Pro+ both sport a larger 6.9" 1316x2832 LTPO AMOLED displays. The interesting Mate 70 RS Ultimate edition that has a 6.9" 120Hz 3,500 nits 1316x2832 tandem LTPO AMOLED.

Samsung Display and BOE are fighting a legal battle in the US, as Samsung wishes to halt the import of BOE OLED displays (such as the ones used by Apple in the upcoming iPhone 4 SE smartphone, according to reports) saying that BOE infringes upon Samsung's patents. BOE, meanwhile, together with other OLED makers in China, answered with a motion of their own, to dismiss an SDC AMOLED patent. 

The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has now ruled that BOE indeed infringed upon Samsung's OLED patents. However the ITC rejected Samsung's request to ban the import of BOE's displays into the US. Samsung asked to re-examine the decision and the final verdict on issue will be given on March 2025.

Yesterday we reported that Samsung Display aims to increase its small-sized and mid-sized AMOLED panels production in 2025 by 10.25% to 475 million panels. It was understood that Samsung hopes to sell more foldable OLED panels and tablet OLED panels.

Today we hear another report that Samsung Display's capacity is totally booked, and the company cannot supply enough smartphone OLED to Samsung Electronics. It is said that Samsung Electronics will order some AMOLED smartphone displays from Tianma to be used in its low-end ranges, the Galaxy M and Galaxy F smartphones.

According to reports, Huawei is enjoying high demand for its AMOLED smartphones in 2024, and it is expected to order 61 million AMOLED panels by the end of the year - up 81% over 2023 (33.7 million).

Huawei suffered from US sanctions in 2019 that drastically decreased its smartphone sales, but in 2023 it has returned to the smartphone market in force, and now it is enjoying very high demand for its smartphones.

BOE technology announced that it developed a new under-the-display OLED camera solution, to enable full-screen smartphone OLED displays with higher quality cameras than before. The company held a ceremony together with ZTE's Nubia and Red Magic smartphone brands, saying that it will supply the display and camera solutions to flagship smartphones from these two brands soon, the Nubia Z70 Ultra and the Red Magic 10 Pro.

BOE says that the new AMOLED displays adopt several innovative technologies, such as SIP ultra-narrow bezels, COP packaging - and the new under-the-OLED camera. The new technology achieves a full 430 PPI resolution for the OLED display including in the camera area, and the smartphones will offer a 95.3% screen-to-body ratio (as there's no notch or punch-hole). 

According to industry reports, Apple recently established four display research labs in China, in Beijing, Shenzhen, Suzhou, and Shanghai. 

Apple has reportedly formed an alliance with China's leading OLED makers, as the company gets ready to deploy OLED panels in its laptops and tablets. Apple is interested in diversifying its supply chain and not rely exclusively on Samsung Display and LG Display for its smartphone and IT AMOLED panels. The main goal of the new research labs is to test OLED panels produced by Chinese display makers, and evaluate and compare them to LG's and Samsung's OLEDs.

BOE launched a new flexible AMOLED display, branded as Q10 AMOLED, that has a new OLED stack and delivers increased performance - the company said that compared to its previous flagship OLED stack, it enhances the peak brightness by 12.5%, the lifetime by 33%, and it reduces the power consumption by 10%. The company also says the color saturation and response time is increased.

The new Q10 display will debut at three smartphones, the OnePlus 13, OPPO Find X8 and Vivo iQOO 13. That specific screen is a 6.8" 3168x1440 (510 PPI) 120Hz LTPO AMOLED. DisplayMate tested the new display, and says it is the world's highest performing mobile display ever, seting or matching 21 performance records. It is the first display to receive DisplayMate's A++ rating.

Rain Technology announced a new technology, called OLED Switchable Privacy, that is designed to protect OLED displays. Rain Technology says that its privacy technology already shipped in millions of LCD laptops and other displays, and is now ready for OLED displays for the first time.

OLED Switchable Privacy is embedded in the display panel smartphones, tablets or laptops, directing and controlling light from the display, thus allowing enterprises, consumers and application developers to hone unprecedented levels of automated visual security. 

DSCC says that shipments of Apple's iPhone 16 series were 8% higher in the first month compared to the shipments of Apple''s iPhone 15 series last year. As Apple continues to target emerging markets, DSCC expects Apple to increase sales of entry level and older iPhones, including the iPhone 13, 14, and 15 series.

Interestingly, a couple of weeks ago we reported that according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo the first-week demand for Apple's new iPhones is lower than expected, with total demand of only 37 million units - lower by 13% compared to the demand for the iPhone 15 a year ago. It remains to be seen whether demand picked up later in September.