Jan. 2 (NBD) -- LG Display didn't supply OLED panels for Apple's iPhone X, the company said in a regulatory filing on Saturday. This indicates Samsung remained the sole supplier of OLED panels for the newest-genreation iPhone model.

In the regulatory filing, LG Display added that nothing has been decided about future panel supply for the iPhone X.

It is also noticed that LG Display has been approved by the South Korean government to build an OLED panel manufacturing plant in Guangzhou, China after five months of consideration.

Liu Buchen, a senior industry observer, said to NBD that LG Display couldn't compete with Samsung in the small-sized OLED panel sector, which was why Apple chose the latter as the supplier.

LG Display's investment in the new plant in Guangzhou is aimed to expand its production capacity of OLED panels, explained Liu.

In 2017, OLED was the star in the global display industry and Apple definitely should take a huge credit in the star-making process.

OLED displays are used for smartphones, virtual reality equipment, wearables, televisions, smart cars, and other electric equipments.

Photo/Shetuwang

According to a recent report released by Japanese Yano Research Institute, the adoption of OLED penals in the iPhone X models helped to increase the world's OLED market volume to 474 million pieces in 2017.

Yano Research Institute also estimated in its report that Chinese smartphone makers will likely to follow Apple's footstep to employ OLED screens, which will further enlarge the OLED display market to reach 635.5 million displays by 2018.

Chinese Securities Daily reported that Samsung in 2018 will supply 180-200 million OLED displays to Apple, 50 million more compared with 2017 and Samsung is considering building new plants to meet the huge order from Apple.

Based on analysis of London-based market research company IHSMarkit, 200 million OLED panels are worth 22 billion U.S. dollars.

LG Display, on the one hand, denied supplying OLED panels for Apple yet bet big on new OLED plants on the other hand. Which part of the OLED market is LG Display targeting then?

A senior industry analyst told NBD that LG Display develops a different technical path from Samsung by focusing on big-sized OLED panels and it has established a dominate role in this niche sector.

LG Display's plant in Guangzhou, China is scheduled to bring on stream in the second quarter of 2019, and is designed to produce 60,000 8.5-gen OLED panels a month. Such panels will be mainly applied in televisions and electronic billboards.

The sales of OLED televisions in China has been increasing over the past several years. Data from the Chinese big data solution provider All View Cloud shows that seven months out of ten from January to October, 2017 witnessed a year-on-year growth rate of more than 100 percent.

However, some business insiders thought that it is difficult for LG Display to narrow the gap with Samsung through expanding OLED panel application in televisions, because currently OLED panels haven't yet been widely used in television production.

Chinese and Korean enterprises are competing fiercely in the OLED panel sector.

Samsung, the world's biggest OLED supplier, invested 8.8 billion U.S. dollars to enlarge the production capacity of OLED panels in a single year of 2017. Chinese BOE Technology Group Co., Ltd. put its sixth-generation flexible AMOLED production line into operation in May 2017 and achieved mass production in October of the year.

The above-mentioned industry analyst noted that improving competitiveness of Chinese panel makers will likely pose increasingly higher pressure upon LG Display.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn