GUY COCKER

Editor- in- Chief

What to make of news that Samsung and LG have decided to stop fighting each other for OLED display dominance, due to the threat from China?

China is already on the way to forcing Samsung and LG out of the LCD display market. Now, it’s moving into OLEDs. LG and Samsung remain dominant in OLED manufacture, but the trend lines are obvious. In 2018, China had a few percentage points of the market, with the rest almost all owned by that South Korean pairing.

By the first half of 2023, China hit nearly 25 percent OLED market share. You’d expect China to be the dominant player in OLED in about five years. That’s scary for LG and Samsung, and explains why they’ve decided to bury the OLED hatchet.

I’m not sure this is good news for OLED PC monitors. They’re rapidly improving thanks to competition between LG and Samsung, each with its own bespoke take on OLED, with Samsung’s QD-OLED panels having advantages and weaknesses—LG’s WOLED tech likewise.

We’ve seen some decent advancements in OLED panel tech, with second-gen OLED PC monitors like Samsung’s Odyssey OLED G9 G93SC and the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG34WCDM offering advances over first-gen models. Take that away, focus on a race to the bottom in a price war, and it’s not obvious the outcome will be better PC monitors.