Jordan O'BrienLG remains extremely bullish on OLED development, despite its plummeting second-quarter operating profit. The company has revealed an additional $1.75 billion investment into flexible OLED displays.
OLED technology is already being widely adopted in a range of different products, with wearables, smartphones and TVs all sporting the technology – but LG Display sees that demand keeps growing.
Despite being one of the biggest proponents of OLED technology, LG doesn’t own the patents on it. That honour goes to the Universal Display Corporation, which is an OLED research company founded in 1994. Due to its non-ownership of OLED technology, it has meant that LG Display has fallen behind Samsung, which is now the largest creator of OLED displays.
In order to reclaim its OLED crown, LG is ramping up production of 6th generation small and medium flexible OLED screens in South Korea. While that’s unlikely to mean much for the world of TVs, LG is constantly looking for new places to integrate OLED screens, from wearables and IoT devices to smartphones.
Dr. Sang-Beom Han, CEO and vice chairman of LG Display, says: “A paradigm shift to OLED represents both a challenge and an opportunity for the display industry.” He added, “LG Display is determined to become the leader in the fast-growing OLED market through timely investments to maximise efficiency.”
The new production line, E6 is set to be installed at its P9 plant in Paju, and is scheduled to start mass production in the second half of 2018 and will produce 15,000 input sheets per month. In addition to this new line, LG Display already has a 4.5th generation flexible OLED display production line (E2) in Paju and is building another new 6th generation production line (E5) in Gumi.
According to IHS DisplaySearch, a global market research firm, the flexible OLED market is expected to grow rapidly with shipments increasing from 59 million in 2016 to 416 million in 2020.