Apple hogging OLED display supplies for future iPhones? No problem, say Huawei and Oppo, we'll make our own panels
OLED iPhone 8 concept image by Matteo Gentile
The iPhone/S7 edge mashup Vivo Xplay 6 sports curved screen, dual camera, Snapdragon 820 and 6 GB RAM
That duopoly, however, is not the only one that uses OLED screens in their phones. The Vivo Xplay 6 that was just announced, for instance, is equipped with a 5.7" Dual edge display of the type that Samsung used for the Note 7, as you can see in the image on the right.
That is why a group of Chinese phone makers - actually, the ones that currently hold the most market share in China - are teaming up to form a consortium and scale up production of OLED displays from sources other than Samsung or Apple suppliers, tip supply chain sources:
Since Apple's next-generation products including tablets and smartphones may use AMOLED panels, demand from 2018-2020 is expected to stay strong which will limit other smartphone vendors from acquiring sufficient supply. This will cause their products to become less competitive in the market.
Oppo, Vivo, and Huawei, which collectively moved more than 70 million handsets last quarter, will be investing in Royole - an OLED screen maker you've probably never heard of - to ramp up its production significantly in the next year or two, and are also exploring other independent options.
That has to be a lot of ramping up, given that those options are said to be able to produce only a hundred thousand panels monthly, but when there is a will, there is a way. The Chinese makers aren't really concerned about 2017, as Apple is expected to have only one OLED iPhone model then, but rather for the 2018-2020 period, when it is likely to hog all extra supply while trying to diversify from Samsung to other partners in OLED making like Sharp or JDI.
source: DigiTimes
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