Samsung Display has postponed its plan to stop making LCD TV panels by the end of this year following a request by its parent company, Samsung Electronics.
The subsidiary said in 2019 that it was planning to quit making LCD panels entirely by the end of 2020 due to intense competition in the industry from Chinese manufacturers that were able to undercut its prices.
However, Samsung Display extended that deadline until March 2021 due to the impact of the coronavirus on supply chains. The COVID-19 pandemic hit production, causing LCD displays to become more scarce, and so anyone who could still ship them out to customers was able to ask for much higher prices. Now, Samsung Display is postponing its plans to stop making them until at least the end of this year at the request of its parent company, Business Korea reported last week.
The report cited a Korean industry analyst as saying that if Samsung Display shut down its LCD manufacturing operation in March, Chinese firms were likely to respond by raising their prices. That would hurt Samsung Electronics as it had originally planned to buy its LCD panels from those firms once Samsung Display stopped making them.
"It seems that Samsung Electronics asked Samsung Display to extend its LCD production to maintain its bargaining power in negotiations with Chinese display makers,” the analyst told Business Korea.
Samsung Electronics had planned to purchase its LCD panels from companies such as CSoT and AUO in China, and possibly Sharp in Japan, once Samsung Display stopped making them. It already buys a large number of panels from those suppliers, with just one-third of its QLED and less advanced LCD TVs using panels made by its subsidiary.
Samsung Display is planning to phase out LCD production in favour of more advanced display technologies such as QD-OLED, which uses blue OLED pixels with quantum dot colour convertors, and MicroLED, which is comprised of tiny, self-emitting, non-organic LEDs.
