Apple Inc is expected to crank out a small volume of next-generation Micro-LED displays from a plant in Taoyuan by the end of this year for its wearable devices, an IDC analyst said yesterday.
The US technology giant is forecast to begin mass production of Micro-LED displays at the plant in Longtan District (龍潭) next year, ahead of rival display makers, IDC analyst Annabelle Hsu (徐美雯) said.
Apple might initially use the brighter, more energy efficient and foldable Micro-LED displays on new Apple Watches, Hsu said.
The company has kept a low profile about the Longtan display factory since it began operations two years ago. The Hsinchu Science Park Bureau in 2015 confirmed the presence of the Apple plant, without elaborating.
Apple has placed more focus on Micro-LED technology after acquiring LuxVue Technology Corp in 2014.
The newest self-emitting display technology shares traits with expensive organic LED (OLED) technology, but costs less.
“Many display makers consider Micro-LED technology a panacea for making flexible displays due to lower technological barriers, compared with OLED technology,” Hsu said. “Flexible display technologies are seen as the possible driving force to developments in end products in the next decade.”
However, Hsu does not expect Micro-LED technology to become commercially available before 2020.
Innolux Corp (群創), a Hon Hai Group (鴻海集團) flat-panel manufacturing subsidiary, has allocated resources to explore Micro-LED technology, but has not yet released any details.
Samsung Electronics Co is the only company in the world capable of supplying OLED panels for mobile phones at present, while LG Display Inc and AU Optronics Corp (友達光電) are mostly making smaller-sized OLED displays used in wearable devices, Hsu said.
APPLE PAY CONCERNS
In other news, the launch on Wednesday of Apple Pay in Taiwan has raised concerns about the possibility of declining credit card fee income for local banks, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported yesterday, citing an industry insider.
The newspaper said Apple would soon be joining issuing banks and network operators such as Visa Inc and MasterCard Inc in taking a slice of the profits from transaction fees.
“Apple Pay operates in existing transaction markets wherever credit cards are accepted; it is not a new segment and it does not make the pie bigger for issuer banks,” the newspaper quoted a bank manager, who wished to remain unidentified, as saying.
Apple Pay is not expected to catalyze significant growth in the local market for credit card transactions, but the new service would take its 0.0015 percent cut of transactions made with the mobile wallet, the manager said.
Compared with conventional credit cards, banks collect lower fees when purchases are made with Apple Pay, and fee income would decline more rapidly if the mobile wallet gains popularity, the manager said.
Market observers have said that the payment service, which is only available for Apple’s newer smartphones, trails behind that of the rival Android operating system.
Samsung, an Android smartphone maker, commands 24.6 percent of Taiwan’s smartphone market, compared with Apple’s 18.7 percent, market statistics showed.
Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行), the nation’s leading credit card issuer with 4.2 million active cards as of the end of last month and NT$392.9 billion (US$12.96 billion) total transactions last year, reported that credit card had contributed NT$5.7 billion out of the NT$18.4 billion in overall fee income that the bank earned last year.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
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