Like many companies, Apple tends to diversify who they work with and who supplies to them. After all being dependent on just one supplier is probably not a good idea since should anything go wrong or if things just aren’t up to standard, it could impact the delay of product launches, which is why we’re hearing that Apple is pushing LG to become one of its OLED suppliers.This is something we’ve heard about in the past, and a new report from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims that LG is expected to become one of Apple’s suppliers for OLED in 2018 which will be used towards the 2018 iPhone. Apparently Apple is pushing for LG because due to Samsung’s dominance in the OLED field, it seems that Apple has lost some of their bargaining power with them, not to mention both companies don’t exactly have the best relationship given their lawsuits in the past.
According to Kuo, “Samsung is now Apple’s sole iPhone OLED panel supplier across front- and back-end manufacturing. We think LGD could institute a similar production model. However, considering its strengths are in front-end process, collaborating with a specialized back- end process provider like GIS will, in our view, significantly boost iPhone OLED panel output rate.”
However we have also heard that instead of relying purely on Samsung, Apple could also be thinking about investing in developing their own OLED technology, which could ultimately reduce their reliance on third-party suppliers entirely, but we guess that might take some time.