Looks like what we reported on earlier was right on the money – South Korea’s Samsung, despite being the largest manufacturer of TVs in the world, found it rather difficult to maintain its LCD manufacturing business, and will instead spin off that arm of theirs into an affiliate as the company pools its resources together to concentrate on next generation OLED display technology. LCD TVs are old hat now, and they could very well be the dinosaur of the flat screen TV revolution. In fact, it is predicted that annual global sales of LCD TVs will be reduced by 8% to $92 billion by 2015, while the OLED market is set to increase based on existing data, topping $20 billion by 2018. I guess Samsung wants to be at the forefront to ride that particular wave.
Samsung isn’t the only one “suffering” in this decline, as Sony too, has exited their LCD joint venture with Samsung late last year, while Sharp decided to cut their LCD output in half for this quarter at a plant located in western Japan. What future do you see for TVs in the living rooms? OLEDs?