Today was a lively news day, so rather than force myself to comment on one story, I will self-indulgently comment on two - but I promise to keep them short.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

1. Taiwan’s makers of large LCD panels all enjoyed record sales in October, Digitimes reported today.  AUO, now that it has swallowed - if not fully digested - QDI, posted sales exceeding NT$30B for the first time, growing 38.6% on year and 19.3% sequentially.  The skeptics among us might observe that AUO’s September sales were less than the total of AUO’s and QDI’s separate August sales (the last month they were reported separately), but the consolidated sales then jumped from NT$28B in September to NT$33B in October.  That’s not at all shabby, especially when CMO’s and CPT’s growth curves seems to be flattening.

October sales, suitably rounded off, for Taiwan’s top four makers of large panels were:  AUO, NT$33B; CMO, NT$20B; CPT, NT$14B; HannStar, NT$6B.

It used to be said there were Five Tigers in the Taiwanese display industry.  Now, depending on where you decide to draw the line, there are two or three.  In Taiwan as in the U.S., the rich get richer.

2. 3Q’06 sales of OLED displays reached 21M units.  That’s a first, but it’s due to be eclipsed by the 22M units Displaybank believes will be sold in 4Q.  These record sales, which do not yet include many of the more expensive active-matrix OLEDs, should be a welcome antidote to the irrational pessimism about OLEDs we’ve been hearing for the last few months.  That pessimism is probably a reaction to the overblown optimism that preceded it.   Perhaps we can now look forward to a balanced perspective that will allow people to appreciate the impressive potential of OLEDs without neglecting the growing pains that lie ahead.

Nokia vice president Antti Laaperi helped emphasize that potential when he predicted in an address at FPD International in Yokohama in October that of the 1.4 billion cell phones he expects to see built in 2010, 200 million will have AMOLED primary displays, compared to 1 billion for AMLCDs.  Until recently, Nokia was very reserved about the potential of OLED, so the fact that Laaperi is now predicting one out of every seven cell phones sold in 2010 will have an AMOLED main display is eye-opening.  Since Nokia is the world’s leading maker of cell phones, making roughly one million units per day, it seems clear that Laaperi is saying Nokia itself intends to build cell phones with this ratio of AMOLED displays.   If he’s right, the AMOLED industry will have to ramp its production from essentially zero to over 200M in 3 years.  Laíssez les bons temps roulez.  (Let the good times roll.)  Unless, of course, you’re one of the manufacturing engineers designing and ramping up these AMOLED lines, in which case you’re in for a lot of sleepless nights.

(For more on small displays at FPD International, see the new issue of Insight Media’s Mobile Display Report, which is being distributed today.)