In recent years, TFT-LCD technology has dominated the display panel market, everything from small, medium and large screens, to the point where all other rival display technologies such as e-paper, PDP, and CRT have steadily been losing their positioning. Amidst this trend, only the AMOLED panel market, led by Samsung Display, emerged as the most formidable competitor to TFT-LCD, showing a steady and fast growth.
Several fast-moving panel manufacturers see the potential in the AMOLED panel business and are planning to enter this market in the near future. Despite such interest in the market, only a handful of companies, including Samsung Display, LG Display, and Sony, are successfully producing on a large scale.
This state can be attributed to several obstacles. The first is the higher degree of technical difficulty in producing AMOLED panels compared to TFT-LCDs. Even with successful AMOLED production, toppling TFT-LCDs from their current dominant position of performance and cost advantageousness is a daunting task. In addition, the market is trending toward bigger screens with higher resolutions, which make penetrating the competitive AMOLED market even harder because the late comers have to develop both standard and cutting-edge technologies at the same time.
As a result, AMOLED manufacturers will strive to penetrate the market with diverse strategic planning this year in order to overcome the various technological and competitive obstacles. More specifically, the majority of manufacturers already producing TFT-LCD panels are busy reckoning gains and losses of making AMOLED panels alongside and how they will be able to maximize profits with minimized investment.
The paradigm shift of the small and medium-sized OLED manufacturing process and substrate process deserves attention in 2013. In the small and medium-sized OLED manufacturing process, open mask-applied WOLED structure is being widely attempted, since it is easy to implement even though the performance is inferior when compared to high precision deposition methods, such as traditional fine metal mask evaporation-applied RGB light-emitting structure, LITI, and ink jet printing. There is also an attempt to produce unbreakable AMOLED panels with a goal to replace flatbed glass used for substrate and encapsulation layer with plastic and thin-film coating, respectively. If realized, the emergence of such an unbreakable AMOLED screen should stand as a groundbreaking innovation for the display panel market as a whole along with the related technology applications sector.
Displaybank has researched the issues and strategies for each and every player in the AMOLED market and published its timely report "AMOLED Panel Makers' Business Strategy and Market Forecast" in order for the companies to safely navigate through obstacles. The report should offer firms insight into penetrating the competitive AMOLED panel market with helpful and individualized strategies.
