TALKING OLED – An interview with IHS Markit display guru, Paul Gray
Paul Gray is Principal Analyst & Researcher within the IHS Technology group, formerly DisplaySearch. He’s one of our favourite interviewees for his knowledge on consumer electronics, and displays in particular. At the recent Global Press Conference in advance of IFA 2017 in Berlin, Jez Ford asked him everything we wanted to know about OLED. SOUND+ IMAGE: Wet end to think of O LED as a success story that will grow and grow, but you were talking earlier on about reaching capacity, so that as more and more people want them, L G. Display[ the panel-making part of L G] may have to start choosing its friends. PAUL GRAY, IHS MARKIT: So our forecast is that it ends up somewhere around the 6 or 6.5 million units a year, shipments total, for OLED. The critical issues are when LG.Display will invest in more fab capacity for OLED, and then what they make on it. So you could use this great big slab of glass and make TVs on it, and if you make 65-inch TVs then clearly you make fewer units than if you make 55-inch. And so a lot of that depends on where you’re going to sell it. In the US 55-inch is a bit on the small side... in Europe it’s probably the sweet spot for a premium TV. S+I: So they could choose markets, rather than friends?
PG: And probably it’s a combination of both. The other option is they could just go for the auto market, and every Mercedes Benz or BMW has an OLED screen in it. And the auto guys will pay more per square centimeter of glass, and it always comes back to the ‘per square centimetre of glass’. The capacity could be swapped between these dierent things. With auto between now and 2019, probably no — it takes a long time to approve something in auto, and it’s a new technology. And the scary thing with OLED in auto is the Arizona car park test — if you park a car in Phoenix in July, and
it must the same in Australia, there must be an Alice Springs test in December for you — if you leave it there all day then the temperature inside reach 80 degrees Centigrade and even higher, and what does that do to the display? Does it cook the materials o? What does it do to the lifetime, the failure modes etc? So that’s what they’re doing at the moment, beginning to learn all those things. Which is why I don’t think we’ll really begin to see OLEDs in cars until 2019 or 2020. S+I: And is nobody else is O LED-capable?
PG: They are the only people at the moment who are, I think, a credible panel supplier until 2021 of OLED in TV. TCL through CSOT [China Star Optoelectronics Technology, a China based display producer owned by TCL, Century Science & Technology Investment and Samsung Display] say that they’re going to do OLED TV; likewise we’ve seen other announcements in China from BOE [BOE Display, based in Beijing] that they will do OLED TV. Well, these things are not easy to make. Samsung had a go and failed; Sony does make OLED panels for broadcast, very high-end, calibrated, up to 23-inch, and they’ve got a nice business there in a very high precision niche — you can say that it’s a boutique business there, very specialist, very high barriers to entry, lots of expertise and intellectual property. And if the thing has to be replaced every two years, it doesn’t matter in broadcasting, that’s fine. S+I: How’ sOLED yield now? Not so long back it was a mere 10%, with nine out of 10 failing, but we gather L G. DIsplay is now far ahead of that. PG: Yes, with 55-inch now they’re at about 80-90%, compared with LCD which is 98-99% now, from people like LG. So the heroes who are completely unsung in this are the process engineers — they’ve done a phenomenal job to turn this around. This is the material yield as opposed to first time good, but even so they’ve
S+I: And how long before it’ s running? PG: Two to three years. S+I: You’ d think they’ d already be going for it.
PG: Well it’s a huge amount of money. You’ve got a couple of billion dollars to finance it… and TV brands are not going to cough up huge amounts of money to finance a TV panel fab, because they don’t have the margins and they’re running the business on minimal working capital to keep the profitability up. So it’s a fascinating situation that now there are seven brands making OLED TVs — LG, Panasonic, Philips, Sony, Grundig, Loewe and Metz — then you can add in China in their own market — Changhong, Skyworth, TCL, I think — and the sole source is LG.Display. S+I: This doesn’ t make for a bidding war? PG: I think we’re not at that point yet, because for most people they are limited volume and they ship a thousand or two each quarter, but it’s now staking out the battlefield in the highend, which is that the cream floating on the coee is OLED. OLED is the ultimate.