Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Whether it is the high refresh rate of 120Hz, off-screen camera or folding screen, although mobile phone manufacturers and supply chain enterprises have played a lot of new tricks and brought some new technologies on the mobile phone screen in recent years, these "selling points" now seem to have calmed down and become the new normal.

With the rapid growth of these new technologies, the mobile phone AMOLED screen industry, in the current severe winter of the entire consumer electronics industry, has also fallen into the plight of overcapacity and declining profits, industry leaders have begun to lower shipping expectations.

In 2021, Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, Glory, almost all flagship mobile phones use high-end AMOLED screens, and the penetration rate of AMOLED in smartphones is more than 1/3. Domestic screen manufacturers also seize the opportunity, relying on the strong demand of the local market, their own price advantages and other factors, gradually narrow the gap between technology and production capacity with South Korean giants.

But even AMOLED technology, which was once popular, has become a "hot potato" and even "can't sell at a price". The bright innovation is difficult to find, and the high production capacity also makes the screen manufacturers have no intention to take care of them. is the mobile phone screen really the end of the race track? How can manufacturers find new growth points? is there a new story to tell here?

Next, what else can we expect on a small mobile phone screen?

01. Mobile phone AMOLED out of favor 2022 Today, we can see that more and more Android phones use domestic AMOLED screens, with BOE and TCL Huaxing as the two main suppliers.

AMOLED is a kind of OLED, which has better screen display effect and lower power consumption than traditional LCD. In the past two years, it has almost become the standard of high-end flagship smart phones.

Not long ago, the domestic OLED brother BOE suddenly sharply reduced the flexible OLED screen shipping target, from 100 million pieces to 80 million pieces, a decrease of about 20%.

BOE has already broken into Apple's iPhone 14 screen supply chain, and I don't know if this adjustment has anything to do with lower-than-expected sales of iPhone 14 standard edition, which is exclusively supplied by Samsung for iPhone 14 Pro screens. BOE has not been able to get a piece of the pie.

▲ iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus in the exchange with industry insiders, we learned that although on the surface, more and more manufacturers have adopted domestic OLED screens, but in fact, there is a relatively obvious "price reduction" in the field of mobile phone AMOLED, and screen manufacturers "do not make money."

Of course, objectively speaking, it is certain to make money, but it is only a matter of earning more and earning less.

Why is it "underpriced"? It is natural for us to think that there is something wrong with supply and demand, and it is true.

In fact, in the first half of this year alone, global smartphone AMOLED screen shipments fell by more than 10.5% year-on-year, to about 278 million pieces.

Sales in the mobile phone industry are not as expected and have now become the norm, and even if the two blockbuster flagship phones of Apple and Huawei are released, they will only stir up a splash on the calm lake, but it will be difficult to make waves that change the direction of flow.

It is worth mentioning that Huawei used to be an important AMOLED screen customer for domestic screen manufacturers. Huawei is now a big customer in mobile phone business, resulting in a large "order gap".

On the other hand, OLED has been the focus of the screen factory to promote the technical direction, in recent years, production lines are expanding rapidly to increase production capacity, suddenly encountered a sudden drop in demand, overcapacity is inevitable.

"without the original customers, there will naturally be the need to expand new customers, and in the event of overcapacity and insufficient demand, it is inevitable to be depressed by terminal manufacturers." A person close to the screen manufacturer told Zhi something.

So how much capacity does OLED have today? According to public data, the monthly production capacity of the global AMOLED is about 1.68 million. If we simply calculate according to the cutting of about 2006.7-inch mobile phone screens on each piece of the sixth-generation line, we can produce about 336 million mobile phone AMOLED screens per month.

In the second quarter of this year, global smartphone shipments were only about 287 million units, which means that the global mobile phone market may not be able to absorb the screens produced in a month at full capacity for three months, with a supply-to-demand ratio of about 3.5 per cent.

▲ global AMOLED production line (built and proposed), source: Guoyuan Securities although this calculation is a little rough, but it can be seen intuitively that AMOLED capacity is really excess.

An industry insider told Zhidong that the large-size LCD industry that domestic manufacturers are good at this year is in a recession, and OLED is facing "unsalable". Under the dual effect, the financial results of the screen manufacturers next quarter may not be too good-looking.

02.OLED has nothing to play with? Apple creates a new match point for you to face the current difficulties of the domestic screen industry, supply chain manufacturers and terminal manufacturers are actively looking for new opportunities.

Since this kind of "small screen" on mobile phones can no longer work, many manufacturers have turned their attention to medium-and large-size OLED products, such as tablets, laptops, monitors and so on.

Screen manufacturers usually call this kind of OLED products "IT OLED".

The core reason why you are interested in this kind of OLED screen is that there is a potential big customer to use, this big customer is none other than the technology giant Apple.

From an iterative roadmap of Apple's OLED screen predicted by Omdia, we can see that Apple's three extremely important product lines, namely, iPad, MacBook and iMac, will gradually adopt OLED screens in the future.

▲ Apple's IT OLED panel roadmap (Omdia predicts) in the third quarter of last year, Apple sold 7.82 million Mac computers and 14.7 million iPad, a scale to be reckoned with.

The reason for being a "potential" customer is that whether, when and whose screen Apple wants to use still depends on the specific technology maturity and production capacity.

At present, from South Korea's traditional OLED giants Samsung and LG, to domestic Jingdong, TCL Huaxing, Vicino and Tenma, are actively promoting the layout of related technologies.

OLED screen has been used in mobile phones for many years, but it is not common in the size field of tablets, computers, monitors and so on. On the one hand, these devices often aim at productivity scenarios and have new requirements and tests for OLED technology.

Whether the life of OLED screen can be guaranteed, whether it can solve the problem of "screen burning", or whether it can meet the new standard in terms of material, cost yield and so on, are all challenges that OLED technology faces.

Double-layer series OLED technology is the R & D direction chosen by most mainstream manufacturers. To put it simply, "double-layer series" is through the use of two-layer OLED luminous materials, so that the screen brightness is higher, longer life, while the same brightness can ensure lower power consumption.

It sounds simple, but in practice, there are still many difficulties to be solved in screen structure design, circuit, driver chip, mass production process, yield and so on.

Schematic diagram of hierarchical structure of ▲ double-layer OLED display unit according to industry information, Apple designed the driver chip, OLED structure and circuit of double-layer series OLED screen, which were handed over to Sanxing and LG R & D and mass production technology. It is widely predicted that Apple's iPad, MacBook and other products with OLED screens will be available after 2024.

It is reported that both Samsung and LG have begun research and development of related technologies, while on the domestic side, BOE, which has entered Apple's supply chain, is also developing related technologies and has entered the stage of mass production. According to BOE's financial report, this "double stack in series" OLED structure can double screen brightness, quadruple product life, and reduce power consumption by about 30% for smartphones.

We can see that in some subdivisions of emerging areas of OLED, domestic manufacturers have basically caught up with the progress of research and development compared with Samsung, LG and other industry leaders.

Regardless of whether the double-layer series OLED technology will revolutionize the screen field of consumer electronics or not, it is clear that there are many directions in which OLED technology can continue to explore.

03. Between the square inch screen of the mobile phone, what else can we expect? Smart phones account for nearly 90% of the downstream applications of OLED in the world. It can be said that the wide use of AMOLED screens on smartphones has driven the development of the whole OLED industry.

Today, when smart phones are in a state of fatigue, the focus of OLED technology penetration gradually begins to shift to medium and large sizes, to tablets, computers, televisions and other fields.

So can we expect a new subversive experience on the small screen of mobile phones?

After communicating with a number of people in the industry, we found that although opportunities still exist, if we want a subversive visual experience, our eyes may no longer be limited to one mobile phone.

Let's start with opportunity. Obviously, the off-screen camera technology, which was very popular a few years ago, is still not mature enough. although Samsung, Xiaomi and ZTE have all launched many generations of off-screen camera phones, the effect of taking pictures is still not satisfactory.

After many iterations have been made by various manufacturers in the aspects of screen material, structure, circuit design, etc., the problem of "low light transmittance" of the screen has not been substantially solved.

A person in the 3D vision industry told Zhiwei that Apple is in no hurry to use off-screen camera technology in iPhone, which has a lot to do with its unsatisfactory photo results, and that for Apple, a perfect experience is more important than a "selling point" that looks new.

▲ Apple iPhone screen shape roadmap predicts, author: in addition to making the screen more "beautiful", making the screen healthier and more environmentally friendly is also the focus of manufacturers' optimization, such as how to use PWM high-frequency dimming to make the screen more eye-friendly.

When it comes to environmental protection, all kinds of "energy-saving" technologies have also become a new focus in the screen field. it is an inevitable trend for the development of miniaturization, thinning and low power consumption of consumer electronic products in the future.

On Samsung's latest flagship phone with a folding screen, the Galaxy Z Fold4, there is an overlooked "cool techs" that Samsung has named Eco ²OLED Plus technology.

To put it simply, this technology uses new color film materials to replace the key polarizers in the OLED screen, making the light transmittance of the screen reach 68%, while the screen power consumption is less than half that of the normal OLED screen.

There are also domestic manufacturers developing similar technologies, such as Tianma's CFOT technology, whose principle is to use CFOT instead of polarizers in OLED to increase light transmittance by 30% and reduce panel power consumption by more than 25%.

On the whole, there are still some technologies in the mobile screen field that need to be polished and mature, but if we want a subversive visual interactive experience, our eyes may have to move from the "flat world" of mobile phones to the "3D world", yes, the meta-universe.

Just recently, according to industry information, Apple asked Samsung and LG of South Korea to develop new silicon-based OLED screens for VR / AR products, and the screen pixel density of silicon-based OLED reached an astonishing 3500PPI.

▲ silicon-based OLED screen structure schematic diagram, source: LG to know that the current mainstream 27-inch 4K display, its pixel density is not as dense as 163PPI.

Apple hopes to develop a technology that can give people a "sense of visual illusion immersion", which is simply to make the virtual world look more real, according to a South Korean parts industry official.

Guo Mingyi has previously revealed that the OLED screen on Apple's first MR headset will be exclusively supplied by Sony. Apple's introduction of Samsung and LG has virtually increased pressure on Sony.

Apple's iPhone X ushered in the "OLED era" of mainstream smartphones, but five years later, the answer is not far away whether Apple can enter the meta-universe with an amazing product and drive the screen industry to the next key point.

04. Conclusion: the story of a screen is far from finished, the size is increasing, the pixel is increasing, the refresh rate is rising from 60Hz to 165Hz, and all kinds of new technologies such as camera, flexibility and LTPO are constantly under the screen. in just a few years, the mobile phone AMOLED screen has gone from barbaric growth to today's "bottleneck", and breaking through the bottleneck may usher in a new beginning.

It is said that the Internet should change from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. Now the major screen manufacturers are also actively studying the display screens used in all kinds of AR and VR products. Perhaps the focus of the screen war is about to move from the mobile Internet era to the meta-universe era.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:zhidxcom, author: Yun Peng, Editor: Xin Yuan

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