LG Bets Heavily on (Large-Sized) OLED

choi

LG | Plucky contender; A South Korean underdog is making a bold bet on OLED technology. Economist, July 4, 2015
http://www.economist.com/news/bu ... gy-plucky-contender

Quote:

LG has a storied past. "Yet now it beats its old adversary [Samsung] in selling only one type of appliance, washing-machines, and is struggling to recover the ground it has lost.  Samsung has emerged in recent years as one of the world’s dominant makers of microchips and smartphones. Last year its electronics businesses, including display screens, had almost four times as much revenue, and almost 15 times as much operating profit, as LG’s equivalent divisions. LG was once big in semiconductors, but was arm-twisted by the government into exiting the business as the country’s industries were restructuring after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. It was once far ahead in selling mobile handsets, too.

"since 2013 it [LG] has been making televisions with organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays. These displays produce notably crisper pictures than even top-of-the-range liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). However, large OLED panels are costly and fiddly to make. Production yields (the ratio of flawless displays to duds) are depressingly low. * * *[Improving] it now says it is achieving yields of up to 80%.

"The thin, lightweight OLED displays, which do not need a backlight, are allowing LG to experiment with transparent, rollable, foldable and curved screens. LG is now the world’s biggest maker of large displays of all kinds

Samsung "is being more cautious than LG in rolling out large-screen OLED TVs. Sony and Panasonic of Japan have abandoned a proposed partnership to mass-produce them. As a result, LG is emerging for the first time in a long while as the leader in a particular component, says Shaun Cochran of CLSA, a stockbroker.

“LG is thought to be enduring heavy losses on its OLED TVs, and is a long way from seeing a return on the $3 billion it is said to have invested in production facilities since 2010.

Note:
(a) In 1947 KOO Bon-Moo 具 本茂 founded LG Corporation 樂喜金星 (headquarters Seoul).
(b) quotation 2: “fiddly to make”

fiddly (adj)
(i) : "chiefly British:  requiring close attention to detail :  FUSSY; especially :  requiring an annoying amount of close attention"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fiddly
(ii) (etymology: derived from fiddle (verb))
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fiddly

(c) "DisplaySearch, a market researcher, says LG has the biggest share (over 90%) of the global market for smartwatch panels, mostly on the back of sales to Apple."

on the back of sth: "soon after an earlier success, and as a result of it <The advertising agency secured the contract on the back of its previous successful campaigns>"
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ ... /on-the-back-of-sth