This week was a busy one for BOE and Beijing’s display enthusiasts. The company was hosting its own Innovation Partner Conference (IPC 2024), and presenting on displays at JD.com’s display industry summit.
IPC 2024 was split up into about 15 forums where the company showcased TV, automotive, OLED, and MicroLED technologies with a long list of partners, and also committed itself to sustainable and carbon-reduction practices. In addition to the display technologies, the company also offered up showcases for its IoT and medical devices. It’s not unusual for large companies like BOE, Samsung, and LG to have these proprietary showcase events and it is almost a rite of passage to claim a stake as a major player in the industry. It may be anecdotal, but IPC 2024 seems to have grown since last year’s event and comes at a time when the Chinese display industry is feeling particularly bullish about its opportunities.
In the MicroLED section, BOE laid claim to the world’s first P0.3 MicroLED vehicle display. It’s got a seamless curved design with no bezel, claims a contrast ratio of 40,000:1, and a peak brightness exceeding 2,000 nits, along with high color gamut and refresh rate. Also on the automotive side, BOE teamed up with Nio, Xpeng, Zeekr, and Geely to present various automotive displays. The Zeekr 009 Lux, claimed to be the first luxury MPV (multi-purpose vehicle), uses something called the BOE LC Smart Curtain, made its debut. It switches between transparent and opaque states and is supposed to block or allow light depending on various conditions in the cabin.
Geely’s Galaxy E8 was featured, too, and it uses BOE’s 45-inch, 8K ultra-wide display, combining the instrument cluster, central control, and passenger-side display into one pillar-to-pillar unit.
BOE also introduced its 55-inch UB Cell 3.0 AI TV, which boasts ultra-high color gamut, contrast, and low screen reflectivity. Another In another TV technology showcase, Hisense was there to show off its 98-inch TV with a BOE panel and an ultra-high refresh rate of 264Hz.
Another notable product was the 31.6-inch rollable flexible OLED display, capable of transforming between 31.6-inch (32:9), 24.6-inch (24:9), and 17.6-inch (18:9) configurations, with a variant offering a fivefold expandable display area and a minimum curvature radius of 4mm.
BOE also caught everyone’s attention with some new tandem OLED display technology, which it claims reduces power consumption by 20%, improves overall efficiency by 50%, and integrates LTPO technology to lower device power consumption by 15%. The company has introduced TADF technology into its tandem OLEDs, claiming to get BT.2020 color gamut coverage to over 95%. Apparently, the BOE’s tandem OLED combines deep green superfluorescence and deep red phosphorescence and leverages TADF’s ability to provide 100% internal quantum efficiency. TADF sensitization enhances the performance of deep green superfluorescence by significantly improving its energy transfer efficiency, allowing it to overcome the typically lower emission efficiency found in traditional fluorescent materials. This results in a notable narrowing of spectral width, with the green light shifting toward blue and the red light toward deeper red, allowing BOE to claim greater color accuracy. The showcase demonstrated a 6.55-inch smartphone panel but the company is hoping to use it in wearables, tablets and laptops helping it to gain more OLED design wins against LG and Samsung.
At the JD.com summit, BOE announced a new ADS Pro and MiniLED backlight display solution, aimed at gamers. The company claims it can reach refresh rates up to 500Hz, get a GTG response time of 1ms, and deliver backlight dynamic response times under 1ms. Among the other marketing features were a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and brightness levels exceeding 1,000 nits. BOE claims 100% DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB coverage, a180° wide color viewing angle and low reflection levels below 1.2%.
Among BOE’s OEMs, hoping to gain traction on JD.com, are Lenovo, Skyworth, AOC, Acer, and BenQ. The company’s hope to ride on the back of BOE’s partnership with JD.com on its technology branded store where various promotions of display technologies have been happening since 2024. This includes something called the S+ Certification which is supposed to give JD.com buyers some level of comfort in the quality of the displays being used by OEMs. There’s a lot of the usual retail marketing mumbo jumbo involved here, but JD.com is a significant e-commerce channel for companies like Lenovo and Asus, and BOE is going to get a boost in promoting its own ADS Pro, OLEd and MiniLED display technologies, at least in the Chinese market. It’s actually good to see BOE, a panel maker, be at the forefront of promoting display technologies that are ultimately going to be incorporate by third parties and not itself. Hard to see how a company like Samsung could ever do that which may become a competitive advantage for BOE in OLED over time.
