The leading display manufacturers in South Korea, LG and Samsung, are closing ranks. They deliver more ground to Chinese manufacturers of TV and smartphone screens and face being charged a lower price than on their leading-edge OLED technology.
Somewhere, a cold war-like scenario for survival for the once-dominant brands in the sector has occurred. Back in 2021, the Korean giants closed their last liquid crystal display factory in China and are set to rely this year on their domestic opponent to produce more of their panels there.
As per the reports, in China, after a slump in global IT sales just after the hard pandemic lockdown, strange cooperation arrived as LG tried to find and sell its remaining LCD plant in the country. After winning the cheaper mass-market LCD technology, Chinese display producers are now making inroads on the last bastion of South Korean technological specialties, whereas along with the leaders, the state-owned BOE Technology is building a $9 billion plant just for producing cutting-edge organic light-emitting diode panels in the southwestern Chinese region of Chengdu.
South Korea’s display industry is going through the same curse as Japan’s in the $160 billion global market, the analysts also stated, referring to the worst-case scenario of JOLED, a Japanese joint venture between Panasonic and Sony’s advanced display businesses that went bankrupt last year with $250 million in legal responsibilities even after fighting to match South Korean investments in the industry.
Park Chong-hoon, the head of research at Standard Chartered in Seoul, stated that “just as Korea overtook Japan as the display industry leader, China is likely to outsmart us on the back of its huge domestic market, abundant capital, and technological development.”
