Better die than innovate. God helps those who help themselves.
A dinner in Beijing in March 2011. In order to speed up the localization, the chairman of a LCD panel factory in China met with the general manager of a Japanese company in order to seek cooperation opportunities.
However, Japan's attitude is not friendly or even contemptuous, he said: "this is a high-tech precision chemical industry, which requires high quality of employees and production line workers, so this industry can only be done by us in Japan, the Chinese can't do it, the Chinese don't obey the discipline, and they have to run the red light when crossing the road, but some Chinese can do it, that is, Taiwanese."
Naturally, the dinner ended unhappily, but in the hearts of Chinese industrialists, the seed that must be made of liquid crystal began to take root and sprout.
Just over five years later, China's LCD panel production not only completely exceeds that of Japan, but also exceeds that of South Korea, a traditional LCD panel power, which ranks first in the world. "It is expected that this year's output will account for 40% of the global market, and it is expected to exceed 50% by 2022.
The battle of LCD has ended. After the success, China's display panel industry began to look to another front. In many people's eyes, this is a sunrise industry facing the next decade, that is OLED.
Does OLED really iterate over LCD?
The times are changing. The display industry has come to the turning point where LCD meets OLED. At this fork in the road, people often question whether OLED will really replace LCD? Electric technology thinks it is necessary for technology and product demand.
LCD products are widely used in daily life, ranging from mobile phones to large screen TVs. In the current display field, LCD is always a stable and reliable display screen material. Its principle is to rely on the backlight layer, control the polarization state of light through the liquid crystal layer, and finally achieve the display effect.
OLED relies on self luminous materials, so it does not need to rely on liquid crystal layer and backlight module, and the mechanism of sub-pixel lighting alone also makes it directly extinguished in black display, which can not only bring stronger contrast, but also save power consumption. Because the LCD backlight is controlled as a whole, it can only adjust the LCD to block the light. The black appears gray and the power consumption will not be reduced.
In short, compared with LCD, OLED products can achieve thinner, brighter color performance, faster response speed, and more importantly, it can also achieve the bending characteristics of flexible panel on certain substrate materials.
All these characteristics make OLED have more potential than LCD in the development path. Although OLED itself has high cost, short service life stability and other problems, but in the case of increasingly mature manufacturing process and reduced manufacturing cost, OLED, a revolutionary technology, will be more widely used.
On the other hand, the evolution of product demand also accelerates the embrace of OLED in the market. In the field of small screen mobile phones, the overall screen fold shape changes put forward higher requirements for screen materials; in the field of large screen TV, OLED features have a certain market boosting effect on the current low price competition cycle of LCD, which is regarded as the next step in the evolution of home appliances.
Dry firewood meets fire. At the time of OLED's growing trend, all road screen factories have already held high the banner to prepare production capacity. Prospective industry research institute predicts that "the global OLED output value will reach about 50 billion US dollars in 2020, and will continue to climb to 58 billion US dollars in 2025". The Chinese market is huge, and the potential demand will be released at that time. There is bound to be a more frequent confrontation between domestic supporting capacity and foreign traditional screen manufacturers.
OLED market has been competing
Chinese manufacturers coming from the LCD era have a deeper understanding of cutting-edge technology, so their actions are more rapid. In just a few years, the domestic OLED market has already been competing with each other.
BOE Mianyang 6th generation flexible AMOLED production line has been successfully mass produced and shipped. In this field, BOE has also arranged three other 6th generation production lines, namely Chengdu, Chongqing and Fuzhou G6 production lines, with capacity of 48K. In terms of production time, BOE Chengdu G6 line has been put into production in 2017, which is in the climbing stage, with the yield increasing gradually; Chongqing G6 line and Fuzhou G6 line are planned to be put into construction later, which can only be lit up in about three years according to the previous rhythm. In addition to G6 line, BOE also put into production a g5.5 generation line in Ordos earlier, with a certain AMOLED capacity.
After the separation of terminal business from TCL group, TCL group focused on semiconductor panel materials. Csot has previously laid out G11 ultra high definition production line (T7), with a design capacity of 105K per month. In addition, a part of OLED capacity for inkjet printing is planned, and it is expected to start mass production in 2021. It has set up a g6ltps-amoled display panel production line (T4) in Wuhan with a design capacity of 45k, which is mainly located in the display panel for 3-12 inch high-resolution flexible and folding smart phones. In addition, other production lines of csot, such as G11 Shenzhen line (T6), are mixed production lines, in which a certain OLED capacity is also planned.
Tianma has released a G6 OLED panel production line in Wuhan earlier, and is ready to put into production in the second phase next year, with a total design capacity of 37.5k pieces per month. In Shanghai, Tianma has also planned G4.5 and g5.5 production lines with design capacity of 7.5K and 15K respectively.
Vicino owns the AMOLED line of Kunshan g5.5 generation line with a design capacity of 15K, while Gu'an G6 full flexible panel production line has a design capacity of 30K. At present, the two lines have been put into production. Last year, vicino laid out an all flexible AMOLED G6 line in Hefei, with a design capacity of 30K per month. It is expected that it will take another two or three years to put into production.