Giving a talk on MicroLED at the Electronic Displays Conference (edC) in Nuremberg recently, AUO said it now has a G4.5 production line, which enables the company to target various display sizes. AUO is focusing on smartwatches and automotive displays. The circular display used in smartwatches can also be repurposed for circular knobs.
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TCL and Hisense both reached all-time highs in global TV market share in Q4 2024, according to Counterpoint Research’s Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report, released last week. The two companies rode tailwinds in their home market of China and aggressively promoted large MiniLED TVs to gain share in the premium TV market.
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The Super Bowl, held yesterday, marks the end of the big TV sales season in the US, and as usual, the top brands made a final push for sales. In contrast with Black Friday, where the low-end Opening Price Point models have special deals, the Super Bowl weekend TV shopper skews towards the premium models, because often the intent is to show off the new TV purchase to family and friends with a Super Bowl party.
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Samsung announced the S25 series during the Galaxy Unpacked 2025 event on January 22 (a few days later than when it announced the S24 series on January 17, 2024).
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From the moment I entered the Central and West Halls at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, it became apparent that in addition to the plethora of TV displays and automotive solutions, this was the year of AI PCs and new gaming monitors.
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In media events held at the start of CES 2025, and in their main exhibit space, the top five global TV makers had very different approaches in their announcements about products. The two South Korean giants, Samsung and LG, focused on artificial intelligence (AI) while the upcoming Chinese competitors, Hisense and TCL, claimed the leadership of display technology in the TV space. Finally, Sony’s conference featured many connections with its content businesses. But all these TV makers described their strategic partnerships with US technology firms.
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As we have done each year since 2019, we have some predictions for the year.
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The central promotional event of the holiday season happened this week, and retailers offered all-time low prices for TVs during Black Friday. Although LCD TV panel prices are about the same today compared with a year ago, on some screen sizes the TV set prices are lower this year. This year we see much more promotion of the largest screen TVs, 98” or 100” LCD TVs. The competition from LCD is also pulling down OLED TV prices, which are also hitting all-time lows.
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Restrained production by major Chinese LCD makers has kept a lid on industry supply in the fourth quarter, and as a result LCD TV panel prices have stabilized. For the first time ever, in our outlook we expect prices for all panel sizes to be unchanged for at least four consecutive months.
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OLEDs found in smartphones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches and automotive applications are fabricated using a fine metal mask vacuum thermal evaporation (FMM VTE) tool. While Applied hasn’t disclosed pricing for their solution, FMM VTE tools can cost $500M each at G8.7 for 7.5K capacity for a tandem stack and the total FMM VTE expenditure for a 15K substrate per month tandem OLED fab can reach $1B. Equipment suppliers can only make and install a couple of these giant tools per year which can easily fill a football field, constraining the pace at which OLED manufacturers can build and expand capacity targeting future applications. In addition, the FMMs constrain OLED performance and limit the maximum size that can be produced. The ultra-thin fine metal masks are inherently constrained by sag, geometrical distortion and the tapered hole shape which results in a smaller OLED pixel and aperture ratio than if they were patterned by lithography. As the FMMs grow, the problem gets worse. With panel manufacturers looking to use larger substrates and build larger panels, FMMs can compromise this effort. In addition, the FMMs themselves are also expensive, take a long time to manufacture, need to be cleaned regularly, can lead to cross contamination impacting yields and require very precise positioning which impacts tool costs and can impact yields.
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