There is actually some positive news to report from the display industry today. (There’s also more of the negative news to which we’ve become accustomed, but let’s leave that for another time.)

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

1. Witsview reports that the top ten monitor vendors shipped 8.85M LCD monitors in January, up 8.3% over December. It seems that monitor inventories were actually running low, and brand vendors wanted to re-stock. The top five LCD monitor brands in January were Samsung (1.9M units), Dell (1.5), LGE (1.4), HP (1.1), and Acer (0.9). Who actually makes the monitors that have those brands attached to them? The top five are TPV (2.36M units), Innolux (2.28), Samsung (1.56), Qisda (0.89), and LGE (0.89).

2. At CES, LCD-TVs with 120Hz frame rate were seemingly everywhere, but it wasn’t only at CES. Models with 120Hz had more than 10% market share overall in Q4′08, with a 40% share for 40-inch models and a 60% share for 50-inch-and-over models, report Siu Han and Yvonne Yu in Digitimes, citing sources at panel manufacturers. Samsung has led this charge, with 40% of its large-panel shipments being 120Hz in the second half of 2008.

Why is this good? Presumably, better motion-blur performance helps sells TV sets, and 120Hz should add a bit to the margin for both set-makers and panel-makers — a boost in margin that both sets of industry players badly need. As is true with many panel improvements, 120Hz will be become standard soon enough, but LCD-TVs with 240Hz panels (either true 240Hz or 120Hz plus backlight scanning for a sort-of 240Hz effect), have already started to appear, targeting the high-end market. More 240Hz models will be appearing as the year wears on.

3. LCD-TVs with LED backlight units (BLUs) will grow to between 2% and 3% of the market in 2009, and to 6% in 2010, industry sources say. Digitimes’ Han and Yu cite industry sources as predicting this could result in the sale of 2.25B LED chips, just for LCD backlighting, in 2009 and 5.5B in 2010. This is based on an estimated global LCD-TV market of 120 to 150M units in 2009 and an average of 500 LEDs per TV BLU. (That 500 number could change rapidly depending on the relative penetrations of edge-lit and direct-lit backlights, as well as on the mix of panel sizes sold.) The increased LED BLU penetration is being made possible by a reduction in the price (and cost) premium over traditional CCFL, and they do carry more margin. Even so, investing in LED chip makers and packagers may be a smarter move than investing in panel makers at the moment. (And we haven’t talked about LEDs for general and architectural lighting, which makes them even more attractive.)

4. Wintek, Giantplus, and TPO expect their revenues to recover in February on stabilizing shipments of panels for mobile handsets. Digitimes Research expects global shipments of panels for handsets to be between 1.0B and 1.2B in 2009. The vast majority of those are LCDs of course. Some are AMOLEDs, with significant growth projected between now and 2012.

A much smaller number use QMT’s interferometric, video-rate ePaper technology, which now goes under the name mirasol, but QMT is bullish. The Qualcomm subsidiary has just announced two new handset design wins with the Inventec V112 smartphone and an economical phone from Cal-Comp. That brings the number of design wins for QMT over the last year to 10. But perhaps more significant for the company is an agreement announced at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week with LG Electronics to begin development of mirasol-enabled handsets.

Details were sparse, but a source told me the development agreement commits both LGE and QMT to provide resources to integrate next-generation color mirasol displays into one or more LG handsets intended for commercial release.

So, here are four pieces of good news. We’ll be looking for others, and we may even find them. In the meantime, it would be a good idea to hold these close and keep them warm.