Mini LED, as a new generation of display technology, has the trend of replacing OLED as the “key to the future” in the display field. But in fact, due to the early layout of OLED technology, OLED has also been the mainstream of the high-end display market.
Take the terminal products as an example, as early as 2007, Sony released the world’s first OLED TV; in 2017, Apple used Samsung’s OLED 3D LED Display screen for the first time in the iPhone X, pushing the more mature OLED display technology to a broader consumer market.
In comparison, Mini LED technology is much later in popularity. In the TV market, it was not until 2019 that TCL mass-produced the world’s first MiniLED TV TCL X10, a new display technology product that was widely praised by the market at the time, but it has been nonchalant.
Until recent years, the Russian-Ukrainian geopolitical conflict, energy shortages and price increases, inflation and the expected global economic recession have greatly affected household consumption budgets, which in turn has caused serious crowding out of the already insufficient TV market.
This has instead become an opportunity for MiniLED displays.
In the TV market, for example, in the downward trend of consumption, LCD TV market prices continue to dip, and OLED TV core brands and too concentrated, according to the set of state consulting report, since 2022, LG Electronics and SONY OLED TV market 61% and 21% of the global share.
The concentration of production capacity thus brings serious “supply shortage” constraints and directly leads to product price fluctuations being small, the price remains high but also brings OLED TV sales decline is inevitable.
On the contrary, the MiniLED side of the landscape is unique, not only in the car and IT market, high-speed growth. Especially in the color TV market MiniLED ushered in an explosive period.
On the one hand, more and more midstream and upstream began to get involved in MiniLED, for example, Shen Tianma, BOE, TCL and other well-known domestic panel factories, Dongshan Precision, Ruifeng Optoelectronics, Jufei Optoelectronics, Longley Technology and other domestic LED display upstream and midstream manufacturers, etc., all attach great importance to the application of mini LED. The scale effect brings cost advantages, the maturity of the industry chain continues to improve, and the supply scale continues to grow.
In the context of the global economic downturn, MiniLED prices have fallen, combined with the decline in LCD panel prices, forming a “double price dividend”.
On the other hand, under the change of consumer trends, the long-tail effect has also ushered in the explosion of brand manufacturers, in addition to such pioneers as TCL, Hisense, Samsung, Sony, Sharp, Xiaomi, Philips and other brands have joined the mini led display screen army. The “crowd picking up firewood”, breaks the “supply shortage” constraints.
In the IT market, for example, with the help of Apple, the IT market has become the largest application market for MiniLED backlight. In 2021 Apple released the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro with MiniLED backlight, and annual shipments reached about 7 million units of scale, which is the biggest driver of MiniLED backlight product shipments that jumped in 2021.
To date, with the maturity of Mini LED technology and a variety of product solutions, more and more downstream manufacturers have begun to join the camp. more than 25 products were launched in the first half of 2022, from high-performance products to cost-effective products with full coverage.
At present, the large size of high-end products is the main battlefield of MiniLED backlight in the TV field, while monitors, laptops, tablets, VR / AR is the second camp, car display after long-term verification, also began industrialization.
In this war of high-end displays, MiniLED is challenging outdoor LED displays, one on one, or has been the general trend.