Display-screen market offering opportunities

Chinese companies are looking to take share in the market for flexible display screens, which is surging because of the preponderance of electronic devices, experts said.

Key to those flexible screens is organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology, which was a main focus of the 2018 Society for Information Display (SID) Week at the Los Angeles Convention Center from Sunday through Thursday.

The annual event, co-sponsored by Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC), also featured exhibitions, symposiums, courses and presentations by the world's leading display companies.

OLED technology, first developed in 1987 by chemists Ching W. Tang and Steven Van Slyke at the Eastman Kodak Co in Rochester, New York, is a display technology used on the screens of smartphones, laptops, televisions and other devices.

"I think the advantage the new Chinese companies have is the market has got more demand for OLED, but there's not enough companies that are able to fill all the demand," said Sri Peruvemba, executive board member and marketing director for SID.

Compared with older, more common liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology, OLED is an energy-efficient alternative that enables manufacturers to produce a thinner screen with more colorful images and wider viewing angles.

Many manufacturers have used the technology to develop transparent and bendable screens.

According to Allied Market Research, a company that studies business trends, global revenue for the OLED market will reach $37.2 billion in 2020, with estimated 18 percent growth from 2015 to 2020.

Korean and Japanese companies, such as Samsung, LG and Panasonic, account for the majority of that revenue, but experts said that more Chinese companies are entering the market.

A report from DSCC showed that Chinese OLED shipments jumped 124 percent to $11.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2017, and are expected to rise 143 percent in 2018 to $28.4 million. Some leading Chinese manufacturers in OLED are Visionox, BOE and Royole.

"OLED attracts people not only because of its advantage in the cellphone market, but more importantly, because of its potential to become foldable," said Ruoyuan Yan, Visionox executive vice-president.

Visionox, formed by a research team at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has 22 years of OLED manufacturing experience.

Yan said Visionox's customers include Nokia and Garmin, and the company is looking for North American business.

"The USA is a very important electrical consumer market. Even if a majority of the OLED companies are in Asia right now, this is a global market," Yan said.

"The US also has big potential clients such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, so for Chinese display companies like us, the US is a market that we definitely won't miss (the opportunity)."

Liu Yinmeng in Los Angeles contributed to this story.