Global and China OLED Industry Report, 2016-2020

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

The OLED market has been developing rapidly worldwide over the recent years, and its market size reached USD13 billion in 2015. With technology and capacity construction, OLED (from small-sized panels about 5-inch) finds fast growing application and is anticipated to substitute for LCD. Once Apple starts to apply OLED panels in iPhone, the demonstration effect will be brought and market demand will be further spurred. It is expected that, till 2020, the global OLED market size will be up to USD33.1 billion, presenting an AAGR of about 20%.

By application, mobile phone is the largest applied market for OLED, and over 76% of OLED panels were applied in mobile phone field in 2015. In future, OLED will get increasingly used in emerging domains such as wearable device, TV, illumination, VR and automobile.

Currently, the world's OLED panel manufacturers are mainly concentrated in South Korea – Samsung Display and LG Display, among which the former focuses on medium and small sizes which are chiefly applied in mobile phone, while the latter gives priority to large-sized products primarily for TV. The two companies are now enlarging their production capacity.

During 2015-2017, Samsung Display will make total investments of USD3.6 billion to establish the novel OLED panel production line in South Korea, mainly involving in medium and small-sized OLED display screens which are still targeted at consumer electronics like smart phone. In 2016-2017, Samsung Display will lavish USD7.4 billion into the production equipment for Apple-used curved OLED display screen. As scheduled, the capacity of Samsung Display will be expanded to 30,000-45,000 substrates in 2016 and to 45,000 substrates in 2017.

LG Display is primarily focused on OLED TV and OLED illumination at present. In September 2014, LG Display launched the world's first 4K curved OLED TV. At the end of 2015, LG Display took over all OLED illumination business of LG Chem. In July 2015, LG Display announced to invest KRW1.05 trillion to newly establish a 6-generation flexible OLED production line (code: E5) in Gumi Plant, Gyeongsang, South Korea. The monthly planned capacity of this production line is up to 7,500 pcs (be subject to glass substrates which have been put into), and it plans to realize mass-production in the first half of 2017.