The upper, middle and lower reaches of the “news” are all supernatural, and the AMOLED industry is in a dark state (1)

The new display industry's transcripts in the first half of 2019 have been released one after another, and the OLED landscape is good. The shipments of smart phone panel and TV are up against the trend by 19% and 21% respectively. OLED panel companies and The cooperation between terminal enterprises is becoming increasingly close, and new technologies and new products such as folding, flexible and transparent are constantly coming out, and the market attention is high.

However, with the steady growth of scale and market, the industry has begun to worry about the limited growth of the OLED market, the rapid layout of production capacity, and the industry entering the platform period.

On the one hand, the cost-effective advantages and performance of LCDs continue to innovate, which poses a major obstacle to further increasing market penetration of OLEDs.

On the other hand, OLEDs have always grown in the stock market, and have not been able to bring substantial new growth points. Capital chasing fresh concepts has begun to look to potential technologies such as Micro LEDs.

In the face of the wolf blocking the road, after the pressure of the tiger and leopard to catch up, the OLED industry will go where. We will summarize and analyze the development trends and future trends of the OLED industry from the middle and lower reaches of the industry chain.

The mid-stream production line was built intensively, opening a new round of layout

From the history of the development of new displays, technology cycle iterations, head position competition and even regional focus shifts are achieved through “counter-cyclical investment” and scale effect competition. Today, as panel prices continue to decline and technology innovation bottlenecks looming today, increasing investment and robbing strategic highlands have become the main competitive strategies of various panel companies and even downstream module companies. After a brief silence in the first half of the year, the AMOLED industry ushered in a wave of production lines to build a small climax.

On June 9, the Helitai Putian project started in Xinhan Industrial Park, Hanjiang District, Putian City, with a total investment of 2.5 billion. It is mainly used for the production of high-end TFT display modules, COF full-screen display modules and flexible OLED display modules. Design capacity of 120 million display modules.

On August 8, Visionox signed an investment agreement with the People's Government of Zengcheng District of Guangzhou City to build a flexible AMOLED module production line. With a total investment of 11.2 billion yuan, the project will be mainly engaged in the production, research and development and sales of high-end AMOLED modules such as curved surfaces, folded-backs, wear and in-vehicle.

On August 12, Tianma Microelectronics signed a framework agreement with the Xiamen Torch High-tech Industrial Development Zone Management Committee to build a 6-generation flexible AMOLED panel production line. The total investment of the project is 48 billion yuan, and the designed capacity is 48,000 glass substrates per month.

Coupled with the 6th generation flexible AMOLED production line that BOE plans to build in Fuzhou at the end of 2018, Huaxing Optoelectronics has put on the schedule of the T5 production line. It is expected that in the second half of 2019, the mainland China region will once again welcome AMOLED panels and modules. The peak of production line construction.

South Korea is also stepping up investment in OLED panels, especially for large-size panels. (For large-size OLED panels, we plan to launch the corresponding topics in the future. We will not discuss them here, so stay tuned.)

In 2019, Samsung further reduced the shipment of LCD panels and restarted the investment in large-size OLEDs. The total investment was between US$2.15 billion and US$2.58 billion. The expected target is to achieve QD-OLED mass production in 2021. The total investment of the plan is between 2.15 billion US dollars and 2.58 billion US dollars.

LGD is investing 3 trillion won ($2.54 billion) in the upcoming 8.5-generation OLED panel in Guangzhou, which will increase its OLED production capacity to strengthen its leading position in large-scale OLED panels.

Analysis of the rise of this round of investment climax has two main reasons.

First, after the initial application, the bottleneck of low yield and high cost of OLED technology has been gradually overcome. The innovation hotspots such as full screen, sensor integration, folding and transparency have been one after another. OLED is gradually becoming the target and direction of display industry upgrade.

Second, the homogenization competition has made the terminal enterprises have a strong demand for product upgrading. The characteristics of OLED make the product differentiation possible, and it has been recognized by the terminal enterprises, which also strengthens the confidence of the panel companies.

Another fact worthy of attention is that this round of investment and construction, the coastal areas and the Pearl River Delta region have once again become the focus, in addition to the local government investment promotion strategy, but also shows that at the current stage of OLED development, downstream enterprises concentrate, easy to follow the overseas expansion The geographical advantage of the market should be an important factor in the layout of the OLED panel production line.

In the future push, we will summarize and analyze the trend of the upstream and downstream of the OLED industry chain, so stay tuned.