Thomas Wegener is a veteran of Fujitsu and Samsung, but is now working for BOE in Europe.
BOE sees itself as an IoT company, rather than a display business and Wegener went through the company;s background. He said that the company is now 21st in US patent applications and already has over 20,000 OLED patents.
Growth in the major application markets has been slowing down, but there is a big opportunity in the IoT space. There is a lot of hype, but even the most conservative estimates suggest a lot of displays being used – surpassing even mobile devices. The new applications will be driven by 5G with low latency and high bandwidth, BOE believes.
The data traffic from the IoT will be huge. BOE does not expect the smartphone to be the hub for the IoT, because of issues of security and other factors. Healthcare will also be a big market because of 5G and these will use displays. Cars will be very important for displays because there will be so many ways to integrate displays both inside and outside.
BOE thinks that Smart Home applications will need a lot of displays
These applications will bring a lot of challenges as well as opportunities, but the display is very central.
What is BOE’s innovation? Integrating additional functions and sensors will be very important and the company expects to be strong in intelligent manufacturing.
As of today, there is oversupply, but Wegener said that his experience is that oversupply can be eaten up by new applications. 4K can replace FullHD and 8K will also be an interesting new category. Turning to 8K, BOE is working on complete image processing solutions including a cloud platform as well as processing and displays.
BOE showed an 8K display in 2013 and has been working continuously on this project ever since.
Looking at OLED, BOE has been working on the technology since 2001. In Chengdu, the company has a G6 flexible AMOLED fab line and there are a lot of new applications that can take advantage of OLED features, but can also replace LCDs. 5.5″ and 5.99″ are the first two panel sizes that are already in reliable production.
Production and products are already in place.
Digital hospital systems are expected to be one of the biggest markets in the future for BOE and the company is also working on a market for artworks that can make the most of displays. The company is also doing a lot of work to help with the synchronisation of online and offline sales in the retail segment. ESLs are an important part of this as well as cloud processing and analytics (presumably, hence, the reason for the acquisition of SES Imagotag – Man. Ed. E Ink Invests in SES-imagotag). Maybe you can convince retailers to use big interactive, transparent displays to replace their shop windows!
BOE has a full 8K Strategy
Analyst Comment
I rather saw this presentation as ‘corporate bull’, but others I spoke to that heard it were impressed by the strategy of going for IoT. Maybe I’m just too cynical!!! (BR)
