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"This year and next year will be the first year of the release and promotion of OLED." On August 25, Liu Tangzhi, president of Skyworth Group's color TV business unit, revealed in an interview with a reporter from 21st Century Business Herald that Skyworth's 4K OLED TV has been mass-produced and it is expected to sell 50,000 OLED TVs this year.
Since LG launched the world's first OLED TV in 2013, market acceptance has been low due to low panel yield and high prices. However, with the recovery of color TV sales this year and the rapid development of OLED technology in the past two years, it has become possible for OLED to enter thousands of households.
In just one month, domestic and foreign color TV manufacturers including LG, Skyworth, and Konka have successively released new OLED products. While the OLED product lineup on the market continues to expand, prices have also shown a significant downward trend.
In the opinion of Liang Zhenpeng, an expert in the home appliance industry, OLED display technology has revolutionary improvements in contrast, black field performance, color gamut, response speed and even viewing angle compared to the mainstream LED LCD TVs currently on the market. The entire color TV industry has gradually reached a consensus that color TVs will surely enter the OLED era in the future.
According to AVC forecast data, the retail volume of OLED TVs will reach 100,000 units in 2015, with a market penetration rate of 0.2%. In this regard, Liu Tangzhi predicts that as major manufacturers increase their investment in OLED promotion, the market penetration rate of OLED TVs is expected to reach more than 15% next year.
The first year of OLED
According to the reporter's understanding, OLED display technology has the characteristics of self-luminescence, which is not only fundamentally different from the light-emitting principle of LED LCD TVs currently commonly used and sold on the market, but also has the advantages of infinite contrast, full color gamut, high response speed and extremely wide bright color viewing angle.
However, although OLED technology has been around for some time, there are only a few companies that have achieved mass production of OLED TVs. Currently, only LG Electronics announced the mass production of OLED last year, and Skyworth recently announced the mass production of 4K OLED. It is worth noting that just a few days after Skyworth announced the mass production of 4K OLED, Konka also released several new cost-effective OLED TVs, and TCL also recently revealed that it is researching printed OLED TV panel technology.
According to Liu Tangzhi, Skyworth has already achieved mass production of 10,000 4K OLED TVs, and for the upcoming National Day Golden Week, Skyworth will launch OLED products covering the high, medium and low-end markets. It can be expected that this year's National Day Golden Week will become the first OLED battlefield for major color TV manufacturers.
LG previously revealed that its new OLED TV EG9600 has now landed in major stores such as Beijing Suning and Gome, and has simultaneously started pre-sales at Suning.com.
According to Liu Tangzhi, Skyworth will invest 40 million to promote OLED TVs during the National Day Golden Week this year, and will plan and promote it from multiple aspects such as store experience transformation and marketing channel innovation next year, aiming to make OLED another growth driver for the company after 4K.
According to Skyworth's first-half performance report, the company's 4K TV sales increased from 15% last year to 28%; driven by 4K TVs with a gross profit margin of 30.4%, Skyworth's overall gross profit margin increased to 22.1% in the first half of the year. TCL Group's interim performance forecast shows that due to the good performance of TCL's multimedia and communication businesses in the first half of the year, the entire group is expected to achieve a net profit of 2.05-2.1 billion yuan in the first half of the year, of which the curved TV released in April this year played a particularly prominent role in improving sales.
In addition, Konka, which is expected to suffer a net loss of 240 million to 300 million in the first half of this year, also hopes that OLED can bring it a turnaround. Yang Xiaojun, executive vice president and marketing director of Skyworth Marketing Headquarters, told reporters that the yield rate of 2K OLED TV panels has reached 90%, and the yield rate of 4K OLED TV panels is expected to reach 85% next year, which is an important factor for OLED to start mass production and popularization. In addition, TV consumption is gradually developing towards the mid-to-high-end, which has increased the market's acceptance of OLED.
According to Aowei's data, the retail volume of color TV market reached 22.11 million sets in the first half of 2015, a year-on-year increase of 5.6%; the retail sales reached 74.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.9%. The increase in retail sales was greater than the retail volume, on the one hand because the product structure is high-end, and the penetration rate of smart, UHD, and 55+ products continues to rise; on the other hand, the new product technology is constantly upgraded, and new products such as curved, ultra-thin, and quantum dot are launched in batches.
Price problem to be solved
In fact, major manufacturers still have different opinions on whether to popularize OLED.
An executive of a color TV company once told Bloomberg that 4K TVs have already met the needs of most consumers. Whether OLEDs can become popular in the future depends on whether their prices can be reduced. Moreover, the yield rate of panels and the connectivity of the entire industry chain are still a major obstacle to the explosive development of OLED TVs.
It is understood that after LG launched its first OLED TV in 2013, OLED technology was not only sought after by foreign companies such as Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic, but also Skyworth, Konka, Changhong, and Hisense. After that, Samsung also released FHD-level OLED TV products to the market, but ultimately failed to promote them on a large scale due to low yield and high terminal prices.
Cao Jianwei, head of Hisense TV technology research and development, said, "OLED has certain advantages in plasticity and dark field display, but the biggest problem is yield and reliability, especially for large-size panel applications. In addition, afterimage, short life and image sintering are also technical problems at this stage."
In addition, from the perspective of industry security, Cao Jianwei also expressed his concerns: "OLED is a self-luminous device and does not require a backlight module. Once OLED becomes the mainstream of the market, Chinese companies can only become distributors and porters of foreign brands." It is understood that OLED TV panels currently account for nearly 90% of the cost, and South Korea's LGD (LG Display) is currently the world's only supplier of OLED TV panels. Therefore, Chinese color TV manufacturers can only do the remaining 10% of the work when making OLED, which greatly reduces their bargaining power.
In the past few years, panel suppliers have been clearly hesitant about OLED TVs. Samsung Display once announced its withdrawal from large-screen OLED panel manufacturing, while Japanese companies such as JDI are still in the wait-and-see and technology reserve stage. But since this year, the attitudes of upstream panel manufacturers have begun to change subtly. Recently, Samsung Display announced that it will invest $3 billion to expand its panel factory in Vietnam, which also includes the restart of large-screen OLED TV panels; LGD also plans to invest another $8.5 billion in the next three years to increase OLED panel technology innovation and scale manufacturing. In addition, domestic panel manufacturers BOE A and TCL Group's Huaxing Optoelectronics have begun to lay out OLED panels.
However, Aowei data shows that the average price of color TV sales in the first half of this year was only 3,366 yuan, up 1.2% from the second half of 2014. According to reporters, although the lowest price of 55-inch 4K LED LCD TVs in major physical stores has dropped to less than 5,000 yuan, the price of high-end 4K products is still more than 20,000 yuan.
Liu Tangzhi believes that, similar to the promotion of 4K TVs back then, the terminal market will need some time to digest it, "but as major panel manufacturers increase their investment in OLED, the yield rate and manufacturing costs will inevitably enter a rapid decline channel." Liu Tangzhi said that the current price of OLED TVs is already about 20% to 30% higher than that of 4K TVs of the same level, and there will be room for further price cuts in the future.
As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity. |
