Experts paint gloomy outlook for global display market

The global display market has seen a boost for the past several years thanks to the brisk growth of information technology and electronics devices that deploy advanced display panels.

Market players, however, should brace for much fiercer competition due to market saturation for mobile devices and TVs, according to industry officials and analysts.

“The display industry basked in remarkable growth from 2010 to 2013 with the touch panel business, in particular, growing at the rate of 27.5 percent backed by the rapid growth of smartphones and tablet PCs,” Kim Seung-su, senior manager of display film manufacturer SKC HaaS, said at the annual Korea Display Conference organized by research firm IHS in Seoul.

“Display manufacturers and component-makers will suffer from worsening profit margins due to the neck-and-neck competition and decrease in display prices down the road,” he forecast.

Predicting that bendable and flexible displays would take up around a quarter of the entire organic light emitting display segment by 2019, the SKC Haas official said display-makers should find new applications to expand the display market.

Other participants at the conference agreed that a key for market players to overcoming those roadblocks in the display market is to come up with new types of products, such as flexible or rollable displays.

Delivering a speech at the IHS event, Chung Ho-kyoon, a former executive vice president of Samsung SDI’s AMOLED research center, said the production technology for large-size OLED panels would make great strides and lead to a wide adoption of the flexible displays.

Comparing the OLED and the liquid crystal displays to David and Goliath from the Bible, the former Samsung SDI executive said “the OLED would defeat the LCD,” when advanced production solutions including soluble production technology are commercialized earnestly which would improve the production yield rate.

Currently display-makers use evaporation solutions that are considered to be relatively inefficient in production, and the low yield for OLEDs, which stands at around 60 to 70 percent compared to more than 90 percent for LCDs, is pointed out as a major setback for the wider adoption of flexible displays.

Among speakers at the event were David Flattery, DuPont’s business development manager, Remi Amenian and Ricky Park, a director of IHS.

By Kim Young-won (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)