Twenty years ago, I was invited to a famous movie producer’s home in Big Horn, Palm Desert, California. The home had a circular design, was 40,000 sq. ft. and sat on a hilltop with a 360° view, where every room had glass folding doors that opened onto a swimming pool that encircled the house like a medieval moat. But what impressed me were the 20+ 40″ plasma TVs that had a combined list price of over $360K. Now, an 85″ TCL MiniLED LCD can be had for $1,500, which puts the 25-year CAGR at -15%, without applying inflation. In 2020, the cost/m² was $46,000; now it is $860. This incredible achievement is the single most significant measurement of the display industry’s contribution to the growth and success of the consumer electronics industry. With DisplayWeek now over, it’s time to take a status look, with the help of Ross Young’s landmark display industry presentation at the Business Conference.
The Crystal Cycle is over, and the display industry based on area that we knew no longer exists. Growth has been diminished, LCD capacity is already excessive, and the technology sources are split with a third possibility on the horizon.
Displays Have Become a Two-Horse Race
In 2024, LCD had a 64% share of display revenue with a dominant position in TVs, monitors, notebooks and automotive displays. OLED had a 36% share of revenue due to a >50% share of smartphones and a growing position in tablets and notebooks. Typically, LCDs have higher share in the low-cost panels, while OLEDs target the high-end, except in TVs where MiniLEDs are outperforming OLED TV.
LCDs Reach Minimum Cost – The LCD TV is so inexpensive to produce that some retailers are giving them away when a streaming service is ordered. A recent report, produced before Vizio was sold, showed the company broke even on sales of TVs, as the profits came from the Vizio streaming service.
OLEDs Getting More Efficient and Less Expensive – The smartphone market is getting to be similar to TVs, where carriers subsidize the complete cost of the phone when cellular service is contracted. But OLEDs are relatively new compared to LCDs and continue to innovate to make the panels higher performing and also less expensive, as shown in the next figure.
As a theoretical exercise, applying the accumulated power reduction for these improvements would reduce power consumption on an OLED display down to 1.5% to 3.6% of its present value.
Power consumption for an iPhone 16 Pro Max, which has a 6.9-inch OLED display with ProMotion (adaptive refresh rate up to 120Hz) and peak brightness capabilities of 1,000 nits typical and up to 2,000 nits for HDR content, is 200-800mW depending on brightness level and content. If all the improvements were executed, the power consumption would drop to 1.2mW – 3.3mW.
Revenue and shipment growth in the major display applications has ended. Revenue from the five major panel makers in Q1’25 is just about equal to their revenue in Q1’20.
Any growth is relegated to niche apps such as vehicle and public displays.
Smartphones, a 1.2 billion unit market that fueled the adoption of OLEDs, has run out of innovations and is now being targeted by smart glasses with AR, which, if adopted, would result in downsizing the existing display industry as two 1″ displays could eat into the demand for the 6-7″ 1.3 billion smartphone panels, the 400 million tablet and notebook panels, the 250 million 25″-32″ monitor panels, and the 32″-85″ 220 million TV panels.
AR has been a testing ground where the current high-tech leaders, be it Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, or Samsung, have chosen to invest billions in search of the ultimate personal solution that has yet to deliver a viable product. The most advanced concept is a pair of glasses with a high-performing micro display that is connected to the Internet, driven by AI and serving as a personal aid that replaces the smartphone, TV, PC and can be used while driving a vehicle.
But that has not stopped newcomers from entering the fray. Last week, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman gave his staff a preview of the devices he is developing with former Apple designer Jony Ive, as he hopes to ship 100 million AI “companions” that become a part of everyday life. Sir Jony Ive, best known for his design work on the iPhone and Mac, is joining OpenAI in a $6.5 billion deal. Microsoft-backed OpenAI is paying $5 billion in stock to acquire Ive’s hardware startup. The remaining $1.5 billion comes from a 23% stake that OpenAI acquired in the fourth quarter of 2024.
Altman noted that it would amount to a “family of devices,” and that stealth will be vital for their success to avoid rivals copying the product before it is ready. Ive and his team have been talking to vendors able to ship the device at scale. Altman said, “We’re not going to ship 100 million devices literally by late next year.” Developing a device is the only way OpenAI and other AI companies could be able to interact with consumers directly, the report noted.
Altman and Ive believe that current devices don’t support the new paradigm. While ChatGPT changed people’s expectations about the power of technology, it is still used in old ways — holding a laptop, opening a website, and typing something in and waiting. Clinging to yesterday’s ideas will be a problem. AI is quickly becoming as foundational as the multitouch display was two decades ago, and it’s ushering in a new wave of devices — centered on instant access to information and intuitive voice interaction.
What of Apple?
Apple services chief Eddy Cue acknowledged the challenge: “New technologies come about, new companies get formed, and the incumbents have a hard time with it.” It was a moment of candor. For all of Apple’s past success, it’s clearly struggling to pivot. While Ive and Altman’s first device may not immediately threaten Apple’s empire, it’s a powerful reminder: In tech, nothing is guaranteed. Whether it’s OpenAI or another insurgent, someone will eventually take a successful swing at the iPhone. Cue put it bluntly: “You have to earn it in technology every day. You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now, as crazy as that sounds. You have to earn it.”
Cue pointed to the iPod, which Apple obsoleted with the iPhone — before anyone else could. But how is Apple preparing to disrupt itself before someone else does? Even Apple’s smart glasses expected next year will be an accessory to the iPhone, not a replacement for it.
New Display Technologies: QD-EL, IJP, MicroLED
DisplayWeek is always a superb place to show new display technology, be it a startup, a product company with a new idea, or one of the majors showing state-of-the-art technology. For years, QD-EL has been proposed as a research effort, but this year, SDC claimed it had solved the key problem of blue lifetime. TCL again showed that it would soon deliver IJP OLEDs, and then again there was the ever-present MicroLEDs with their OLED replacement strategy. None of these demonstrations, even when extended 5-10 years out, offered a competing argument for replacing the incumbent technology.
QD-EL is targeting the high-end TV, with a message that it reduces the cost of a QD-OLED panel by eliminating ~$100 of OLED expense. The OLED TV market isn’t large enough to justify a major investment, and IJP doesn’t provide sufficient pixel density to go after smartphones.
IJP OLED has yet to prove it has the performance and lifetime to compete with VTE OLEDs and could face targeted competition from OLED Max.
MicroLEDs—even the purveyors have shifted to AR away from watches, TVs and smartphones, but being dependent on a product with major UI challenges is unlikely to encourage continued investment.
Moreover, the market researchers, once burned, are reluctant to forecast revenue of more than $0.5 billion through the end of the decade.
The rise of AI, merging with AR, is going to create new challenges for a display industry already plagued with too much capacity and encumbered by slow growth of its mainstream products. Altman may be parroting Trump with his outlandish projections that people want to stop looking at displays. But the display industry needs to participate in changing how we interact with displays and make it simple to use the new tools that are available to enhance the visual experience.
Aledia Targets ~1″ Monolithic R,G,B LEDoS Panels at $75 Each by 2027
Aledia, a spin-out from CEA Leti, came to DisplayWeek 2025, specifically the Business Conference, claiming to have a new business plan and a new CEO. The new CEO showed up, but it was the same business plan just turned upside down. Aledia has equity funding of $500 million and invested $200 million in an 8″ LED fab. What has attracted the large investment given the surplus of MicroLED capacity is the unique formulation using nanowires (NW) to establish the size of the MicroLED chip, which creates the opportunity to create multiple emitters per chip. Aledia claims the following advantages by using this process:
- Reduction or elimination of the drop in efficiency as the size of the emitter decreases
- The capability to use GaN for all colors
- The capability to produce a wafer containing R,G,B emitters
These achievements would give Aledia the solution to the key issues facing the use of MicroLEDs in the see-through AR application, the most demanding and the highest volume of the XR trio applications. The next figure shows how the nanowire (NW) is used and the EQE stability over various sizes.
Aledia claims that technology will solve many of the issues constraining the growth of AR including:
- Reducing the size and weight of batteries by the use of high-efficiency NW MicroLEDs – Target green at 70cd/W by 2027
- Eliminating the cost of color conversion through the use of RGB MicroLEDs
- Producing the luminance needed to operate in high ambient conditions
- Adopting 12″ wafer and pricing 2 high-resolution panels (MicroLEDs + CMOS backplanes) at ~$150
- Growing micro display capacity from 1 million in 2027 to 30 million in 2030
Aledia has issued press releases about their use of GaN for all colors, a distinct departure from the current practice, and they projected that the three colors could be interspersed on the same wafer, which would enable a full-color panel to be cut without any transfer activity. This breakthrough technology was not addressed in the Aledia presentation at the Business Conference.
If Aledia is successful in the AR market, they plan to target the entire display industry as shown below:
Aledia’s 2025 strategy is a complete U-turn from their last public presentation when they were going to target the standard display industry first and, if successful, move into AR. Much has changed since 2023, including swapping out CEOs and a small increase in AR devices, which Aledia claims is now 700K annually. But the projected market size of AR devices, even in 2030, would not justify the investment, even if they were the only supplier, which they are not.
Aledia’s business plan is now dependent on participating in a market which, for all intents and purposes, exists in name only, aside from Magic Leap, after being abandoned by Google and Microsoft. But these CE giants along with Meta, Apple and Samsung are still believers. The challenges are making the user comfortable, eliminating jitter and solving optics issues that prevent the eyes from adapting digital imagery similar to real images.
In addition, by 2028 OLEDoS will be a five-year mature product with multiple suppliers, and the Sony $236 advanced panel is likely to cost $100, or less, which is the typical price of less advanced OLEDoS today. As to the ability of MicroLEDs to compete in the larger display market, even if Aledia hits their targets, the prices of MiniLED TVs will limit the market size, the OLED cost portion of smartphones is too low (~$5) for MicroLEDs, smart watch market is saturated with $30 OLEDs, half the price that Aledia suggests, leaving autos, notebooks and tablets as a priority for a high-end differentiated display.
Aledia’s technology could help enable AR and if the consensus among the CE companies is just 10% of the smartphone market, it would reach 240 million panels, but all of this is pure speculation and some companies like Meta have already written off the use of MicroLED technology, in favor of laser constructs. The consensus market research forecasts of the entire MicroLED market in 2030 is ~$0.5 billion.
Barry Young has been a notable presence in the display world since 1997, when he helped grow DisplaySearch, a research firm that quickly became the go-to source for display market information. As one of the most influential analysts in the flat-panel display industry, Barry continued his impact after the NPD Group acquired DisplaySearch in 2005. He is the managing director of the OLED Association (OLED-A), an industry organization that aims to promote, market, and accelerate the development of OLED technology and products.
