What They Say
Various Korean news reports say that Samsung’s Visual Display division has met with LG Display with a view to buying, it is reported, one million TV panels this year and four million next year.
What We Think
Well this would be a big, big surprise and I did check that the reports were not dated 1st April!
On the one hand, Samsung’s premium TV business has been impacted by the success of OLED over recent years. It has done OK, but with OLEDs as well, it would have done even better. Of course, Samsung put huge resources into its first and failed attempt to make large OLEDs for TVs. Clearly, there is a market for OLED TVs that Samsung doesn’t currently address.
On the other hand, Samsung Display is committed to QD-OLED with a large investment in a new fab. Initially, the Samsung VD business said that it thought that with LED, MiniLED and inorganic LED technologies, it had enough different technologies already. However, a deal seemed to have been done that Samsung VD would support the QD OLED if SDI continued to make LCDs for TVs (not such a tricky decision at today’s prices!). If Samsung bought LG OLEDs, it would then have yet another issue of differentiation to deal with, between its own QD OLEDs and LG’s OLEDs. Further, it has vehemently attacked OLED for issues of burn-in and lifetime and it would have to row back on that pretty hard if it adopted the technology.
Then again, the success of miniLED and iLED depends on significant cost reductions. (I think from now, I’ll use that term to describe TV’s like “The Wall” based on inorganic LEDs and to avoid any confusion between Samsung’s own misleading use of ‘LED TV’ for LED backlit LCDs) If Samsung judges that cost reductions can’t come quickly enough or that it will, in the longer term, be unable to get enough LCDs for TV of good enough quality from Chinese vendors, then OLED might provide an alternative, with WOLED and QD-OLED forming different segments of a range that Samsung is likely to re-brand as a single technology to TV buyers. Further, we have heard that a financial analyst has suggested that LG Display may have made a breakthrough on inkjet printing of OLEDs. That might have the potential for a significant reduction in panel cost, which would extend the scope of OLED TVs from just the premium end towards the mainstream.
As a final thought (for now), if Samsung VD was trying to get better terms for the purchase of QD-OLED or more LCDs from SDI, what better way than to get a credible rumour into the Korean press that it was about to boost the prospects of SDI’s most established long term competitor? Stranger things have happened… (BR)
(ps if any of our readers has any inside knowledge on this topic, we’d love to hear it!)
