UBI Research says that LG Display will start mass producing OLED lighting panels at its 5-Gen fab by the end of September 2017, which will the growth period of the OLED lighting market.
According to UBI, the market will reach panel sales of $1.9 billion by 2021, and continue its fast growth to reach $5.8 billion by 2025. That's a CAGR of 85% from 2017 to 2025!
UBI Research estimates smartphone OLED display shipments reached 95.3 million units in Q2 2017, up 2.6% from last year (92.9 million Q2 2016) while TV panel shipments grew 165% to reach 370,000 units.
Compared to last quarter (Q1 2017), smartphone shipments grew 0.6%. Samsung Display is still the clear market leader - with a market share of 96.7%. OLED TV panel shipments increased 21.2% from Q1 2017, and UBI expects this market to continue growing gradually throughout 2017.
UBI Research says that as OLED makers are diverting all efforts into flexible OLED production, thin film encapsulation (TFE) is gaining in popularity. Between 2017 and 2021, TFE will be applied to about 70% of all OLED panels in production. The OLED encapsulation equipment market will generate $11 billion in sales.
TFE encapsulation started out as a complex technology that required 11 layers and was slow and expensive. Recent advances allowed OLED makers to reduce the number of layers to just 3 and increase productivity and yields and so lower the production costs. Some film OLED makers opted for hybrid encapsulation (which uses a barrier film) but TFE seems to have become the technology of choice.
UBI Research estimates that the AR and VR market will grow to 96.4 million units and $58.7 billion in device sales by 2021. In 2017, 17 million units will ship generating $3.9 billion in revenues. From 2017 to 2021 the market will grow with a CARG of 54%.
According to UBI, the VR and AR market was split almost 50% between OLED and other technology displays, with 2.6 million OLEDs shipped in 2017. Most next generation VR headsets will use OLED displays, however, and by 2021 OLEDs will occupy 80% of the market.
UBI Research says that AMOLED revenues reached $4.31 billion in Q1 2017, up 15% from Q1 2016. In terms of units sold, UBI says that 99.1 million AMOLED panels were shipped - up 9% from Q1 2016. Obviously this means that average price per panel is up - probably because most of the growth came from higher-end flexible AMOLED displays and larger OLED TV panels.
Looking forward, UBI says that in the next quarters over 100 million AMOLED panels will ship - and over 300,000 OLED TV panels. The total AMOLED maket will grow at a CAGR of 33% - and reach $59.3 billion in 2020.
UBI Research estimates that the OLED emitter material market will grow from $960 million in 2017 to $3.36 billion in 2021.
UBI says that displays shipping to Apple will amount to $560 million in emitter material sales in 2021.
UBI Research estimates that Samsung Display's AMOLED market share will be 89% in 2017. As more and more OLED producers join the market, SDC's market share will fall to 72% by 2020.
Samsung Display will still increase its production capacity substantially - but it will not be able to remain its market share. The whole market will grow to $57 billion by 2020 (up from about $12-15 billion in 2016), so this is still an excellent growth for Samsung.
UBI Research says that automobiles will start adopting OLED displays "in earnest" starting in 2018 - for instrument cluster and infotainment displays. The automotive display market itself is expected to grow quickly (CAGR of about 17% from 2017-2022) as new technologies mean that displays in cars are getting more and more important.
UBI estimates the total automotive display market at $25 billion by 2022 - out of which OLEDs will account for about 20%, or $5 billion. The main challenge still facing massive OLED adoption, according to UBI, is the lifetime of AMOLED panels.
UBI Research is seeing increasing demand for OLED in smartphones - especially for flexible OLEDs. The market analysts at UBI estimate that the market share of OLED technologies in the smartphone display market will rise from 16% to over 62% in 2016.
UBI sees most investments in OLED capacity increase in the future going into flexible OLEDs - and by 2021 flexible OLEDs panels will represent about 70% of the total smartphone display OLED market.
UBI says that in Q3 2016, shipments of AMOLED panels for smartphones reached 96 million. This is an increase of 148% over Q3 2015 and a 103% increase over Q2 2016.
UBI sees AMOLED shipments increasing in a CAGR of 41% from 2016 to 2020, to reach 1.4 billion units in 2020. Flexible OLEDs will amount to about 60% of all AMOLED shipped by 2020.
