Not long ago, foreign media reported that the United States Patent and Trademark Office announced a new patent "sapphire coating solution for electronic equipment" submitted by Apple. This patent describes a new technology that will add sapphire coating to the screen of electronic devices. It is worth noting that the products equipped with this technology are electronic devices equipped with OLED screens. It has been reported that the iPhone will use OLED screens next year, and Samsung has received a large number of orders. Some research institutions predict that the compound growth rate of OLED screen market will reach 48% in 2016-2020. Panel manufacturers such as Samsung, LG and BOE are increasing their investment in OLED screen production lines. Sharp also began to increase its investment in OLED panels after being acquired by Foxconn.
Recently, South Korean media reported that Apple had placed an order with South Korean operators to find 200 million OLED screens for next year's mobile phones, of which Samsung had won 100 million. Samsung and LG will continue to compete for the remaining orders. Sharp, which was acquired by Foxconn, has invested heavily in the OLED panel product line, but it will not be able to mass produce until 2018 at the earliest. Another Apple parts supplier has shown to the Korean media that it is now stepping up its preparations to provide OLED panel related parts for next year's iPhone. As we all know, the OLED panel used by Hongmi Pro is rumored not to be produced by Samsung, but by BOE and Hehui Optoelectronics, but the production capacity of Samsung and LG accounts for 95% of the world.
In the past two years, as domestic manufacturers have gradually accepted OLED screens and placed orders with Samsung and other manufacturers, it is estimated that only LeTV and Hammer are the well-known domestic mobile phone manufacturers, and none of them has ever used OLED screens. OPPO、vivo、 Meizu, Huawei, Nubia and other manufacturers have ordered OLED screens from Samsung. At the same time, Samsung's own mobile phones also need to use these screens, so next year is definitely a major challenge for Samsung. In those days, HTC and Samsung also hated each other because of insufficient OLED screen capacity.
TSMC basically handed over the most advanced 20nm pipeline to Apple A8 processors that year, which forced Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm and other manufacturers to stay in the 28nm backward process. If Samsung emulates this practice next year and gives priority to the use of OLED screens for iPhone, it is estimated that the offending manufacturers are no less than those offended by TSMC that year. Let's take a look at the conceptual image of the online exposure of iPhone using OLED screen:
