Oled Structure.The global supply of LCD panels will tighten. Affected by the increasing demand from downstream customers and the shortage of upstream chips and key components, global LCD panel prices will continue to rise in March after a big rise in February.

Relevant industry insiders said that customers are actively replenishing the inventory of LCD panels for televisions or other equipment, but this makes the shortage of display driver chips and glass substrates more serious, thus affecting the actual shipments of LCD panels of different sizes, eventually leading to a rise in prices.

In fact, the global panel shortage is partly due to the termination of the supply of LCD panels by Samsung monitors, but according to the information given by panel manufacturers such as BOE, although the withdrawal of Samsung monitors in the first half of 2021 will have an impact on supply, the rest of the panel manufacturers will soon fill the gaps and the subsequent supply pressure may be alleviated.

In the early days of technological development, it was common to face blockades from overseas giants. When you don’t have it, they don’t give it to you. Once you have it, they immediately open up, cut prices, and suppress it. In the development of domestic LCD technology, this routine is the same.

With the step-by-step development and growth of the domestic LCD screen industry, it is necessary to seize the opportunity of counter-cyclical investment in the industry, as well as the support of the enterprise’s own efforts, policies and funds.

As BOE announced in 2009 that it would begin to expand to the high generation line, Japanese and South Korean giants such as Samsung, LG and Sharp also began to plan to set up a high generation panel factory in Chinese mainland. From 2011 to 2015, several 8.5 generation production lines of TCL Huaxing, JD.com Fang and CLP Panda have been put into production one after another.

In December 2017, BOE’s Hefei 10.5 generation production line was officially put into production, which is also the first 10.5 generation production line in the world. A higher generation production line means a significant improvement in cutting efficiency in larger sizes. From catch-up to anti-surpassing, Chinese screen manufacturers began to walk in the forefront of the LCD industry.

In the future, the direction that domestic screen enterprises still have to work hard is to be “big” in terms of quantity and “strong” in technology. In the view of Yuan Feng, vice president of Beijing Oriental, the LCD industry will have a golden period of about 10 years in the future, while the whole LCD industry has entered the stage of integration.

On August 28, 2020, TCL Huaxing announced that it would buy Samsung’s 8.5G LCD production line in Suzhou for 7.6 billion. A month later, BOE announced plans to acquire CLP Panda 8.5G and 8.6G LCD production lines. The pattern of China’s two giants is becoming more and more prominent.

DSCC estimates that with the release of Chinese screen factory capacity and the closure of South Korean production lines, Chinese mainland’s LCD capacity will reach 70% by the fourth quarter of 2022, while Omdia also expects BOE and TCL Huaxing’s combined LCD capacity share to reach 40% this year.