Taipei Times (TT): Last month, Corning said growth would come from mobile products like tablets and large-sized TVs. What do you see from the LCD market situation lately as local maker AU Optronics Corp (友達光電) says it sees signs of an upturn?
Alan Eusden (Eusden): The market will keep on growing. We talked about it when we had our investor conference in July. We talked about growth in the third quarter versus the second quarter.
We expected ongoing growth in business. We think the best way we can help growth in the industry is to use our innovation. We can bring the innovations like you saw today to our customers, and they can turn them into products that consumers really want.
TT: As weak economies have a certain impact on consumer consumption, how will a prolonged macroeconomic downturn impact the LCD industry? And PCs, TVs and consumer electronics?
Eusden: I’m sure that we know the global economy’s up and down, and that swings the LCD industry a little bit. But we also notice that people always buy TVs. People always buy other new products. And so, I’m sure there will be some impact from it.
Certainly, there are elements of weakness out there, but we also see continuing growth in each of those segments this year, compared to last year. What we believe is there [will] always be some cycles of demand through the end of the year.
We do expect the third quarter will be stronger than the second quarter probably because of that [seasonal shopping] in terms of volume.
TT: Where will Corning’s growth come from?
Eusden: Do you know where we are going to have the highest growth [in the] next few years? High-performance displays. Because it started from a small basis. People are very interested in and doing relatively rapidly. Already we are seeing that in small devices like smartphones. We can see that more and more in some medium-sized devices such as tablets. I think not too far from now we will see that in PCs.
They are in the market today in LCD base, or OLED base.
TT: Can you give us more information about the high-performance Lotus glass?
Christopher Hudson: Lotus today has actually been sold to multiple customers. Earlier this year, we announced further expansion in relationship with Samsung using Lotus as a key glass. So when you look at how this high-performance glass, there are a lot of activities and products going on.
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