Samsung’s New Gen 6 Fab to Add >400m 6” Display Production
July 10, 2017

Last week, Samsung reported they were going to build the world’s largest flat panel fab, with a Gen 6 OLED capacity of 240-270 substrates/month. It would have two buildings and would be constructed over 3 years. We modeled the capacity in terms of 6” panels applying separate yields and utilization for Korea, Japan and China to determine how many panels could be produced each year. Looking at the benchmark year of 2020, the total OLED capacity for yielded 6” panels would be

• 1.3b flexible
• 0.5b rigid
• 0.4b rigid/flex (fabs that could build either type)

 
The contribution that the new Samsung fab would make is 0.4m.  Given that the total smartphone market is likely to be ~1.8b in 2020, OLEDs would have saturated the market.  Assuming 20% of OLED capacity would go for other applications, OLED fabs would still have sufficient supply for all smartphones, which would force rigid OLED displays to be priced at the equivalent of the lowest cost a-Si TFT LCDs, since it is likely that 400m to 750m smartphones would be priced at the low-end or under US$100.
 
Samsung did mention that some capacity would be devoted to foldable displays, which takes 2X the area of a standard display, but since they are not expected to produce the first foldable display until 2019, the earliest, the impact would likely not effect volume until the mid-2020s.
 
 
 
 
Figure 1: 6” OLED Yielded Panel Capacity by Backplane

Source: OLED-A, Companies

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