A decade ago, innovative Tai-wanese flat panel display companies started investing in a cutting-edge and cost-saving organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology in an attempt to move beyond the slim profits associated with original equipment manufacturing.
Those companies, however, have all but given up hope as high technological barriers and cutthroat competition from cost-efficient liquid-crystal-display (LCD) makers have placed them deep in the red.
"Taiwanese companies hoped to make big money from manufacturing slimmer OLED displays at lower prices than LCD panels," said Roger Yu (
"But, the dream has not yet come true as progress in developing competitive products has been slow because of poor foundry yields and performance," Yu said, adding that most companies were still struggling to break even.
Low yields have prompted LCD panel makers AU Optronics Corp (
Heavy losses have driven many pure OLED manufacturers out of the market. Singapore's Ness Display closed its doors recently because it failed to attract enough capital amid falling prices to continue operations.
Back home, optical-disk maker Ritek Corp (
"Sharp price reductions and difficulties in cutting costs are the major challenges for OLED display makers," said Kevin Liao (
Ritek said on Wednesday that it planned to sell an OLED manufacturing affiliate, Ritdisplay Corp (
"The deal will bring more resources for Ritdisplay and boost its core competitiveness as well as reduce financial reliance on the parent company," Ritek said in a statement.
DisplaySearch's Liao also said limited OLED equipment and component suppliers were behind slow improvements in the industry cost structure.
Technologically, OLED displays readily compete with LCDs in small-and-medium applications such as handset displays and MP3s palyers, but LCD makers are able to edge OLED suppliers out of the market by undercutting them on price.
Overall, OLED display shipments expanded by 15 percent to 16.1 million units in the second quarter of this year over last year, but revenues dropped 14 percent to US$112 million, according to a DisplaySearch tally.
"It's tough for Taiwanese companies to survive as they are smaller in scale than their rivals," Liao said.
Liao said those companies remaining in the industry were conservative about expansion plans.
Ritdisplay, established in 2000, has a capital value of NT$7.5 billion while
local rival Univision Technology Inc (悠景) is worth just NT$1.8 billion.
On top of that, “the competition will intensify next year as more Chinese
players are preparing to join the game,” Liao said.
Looking from a longer term perspective, Liao said there was still
opportunity in the industry. To divert from direct competition with
lower-priced LCD panels, OLED display manufacturers should target niche
market segments such as Asian handset makers, he suggested.
But Polaris' analyst Yu said he would take a wait-and-see attitude about
OLED stocks as he expected they would still have a long way to go before
making significant gains.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS