South Korea has finally drawn the curtains on its participation in the LCD TV display manufacturing industry, with LG Display shutting down its last remaining factory, located in China.
The sale of the facility to TCL CSOT means that Chinese firms have now established an iron grip on the LCD TV display industry, and will henceforth manufacture the vast majority of all of the panels used in consumer LCD TVs.
LG Display announced it would sell its last LCD TV panel factory, located in Guangzhou, China, to TCL CSOT last September. The deal was valued at around 10.8 billion yuan (around £1.12 billion), and the transaction has now been settled.
LG Display had been running the facility right up until the end. But in an announcement last week, TCL CSOT said it has “completed the transaction approval and commercial registration procedures” pertaining to the sale. The company, which is the display-making subsidiary of TCL Electronics, plans to rename the 8.5-generation factory as “T11” and will immediately take over the production of LCD displays there.
The sale comes after LG Display shut down its remaining LCD TV display production lines in South Korea last year, before converting them to manufacture OLED displays.
Samsung Display, the other big Korean display manufacturer, exited the LCD TV panel business for good in June 2022 when it rejigged its own production lines. It then confirmed it had sold a number of LCD TV panel patents and manufacturing facilities to TCL CSOT in September of that year.
Chinese display makers forced their South Korean counterparts out of the business by squeezing their profitability. With cheaper labor costs and greater economies of scale, they were able to undercut the Korean firms on manufacturing costs, squeezing their profitability. Ultimately, both companies decided to exit the business and switch to manufacturing more advanced TV displays, such as WOLED, QD-OLED and MicroLED.
The sale of LG Display’s last Chinese factory means that China’s big three panel makers – TCL CSOT, BOE and HKC – now control 70% of the world’s global production capacity, with smaller Chinese firms accounting for most of the rest.
TrendForce said TCL CSOT now operates two 6-Gen LCD production lines, four 8.5-Gen lines, a single 8.6-Gen line and two 10.5-Gen lines, giving it a 22.9% share of the world’s LCD TV panel production capacity.
LG Display still manufactures LCD panels for smaller devices, such as laptops, but it’s likely to move away from there in future too, given its focus on more advanced OLED displays in the monitor industry.
