China’s Everdisplay competes with Samsung in rigid OLED panels

China’s Everdisplay Optronics is expanding its territory in the rigid OLED panel market for laptops and tablets. In particular, the company is directly competing against Samsung Display over supplying laptops and tablet PCs for Huawei Technologies, according to industry sources on April 7.

The panel being developed by Everdisplay for Huawei’s 12.6-inch tablet touts a screen ratio of 16:10, and with a picture resolution of 2560x1600.

Everdisplay has so far developed rigid OLED panels for more than four types of laptops and tablets including the 11-inch tablet from BBK, the 11.5-inch tablet from Huawei, the 15.6-inch tablet from HP and Dell – which Samsung is already supplying to. Mass production is expected in the second and third quarters of this year.

Until now, Samsung Display had dominated the rigid OLED panel market with its capacity as the only company capable of mass production. But conditions have recently been changing as major PC makers have been more widely applying rigid OLED panels; in 2019, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo used such panels for some of their premium models.

Everdisplay has been developing OLED technology for a while now, longer than most of its rivals. Adding to its sense of urgency is that unlike its competition, it has no LCD sales to fall back on. Such rivals have been more focused on flexible OLED panels, but recently are working on rigid panels. BOE, for instance, is developing 15.6-inch, 12.6-inch and 13.3-inch rigid OLED panels for laptops.

In 2019, Samsung Display shipped 4 million rigid OLED panels for laptops and tablets. Among them, 3 million were fitted into Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy Tab tablet. The 4 million figure only accounts for 1.3% of the entire portable PC shipment volume for 2019, but it expected to show further growth beginning in 2021.

The Elec is South Korea’s No.1 tech news platform.