The competition between Chinese manufacturing and Korean manufacturing in the high-tech industry is becoming more and more fierce. One of the typical examples is the panel industry. Chinese panels are overtaking in advanced technology, and will overtake South Korea in advanced technology, giving a heavy blow to Korean manufacturing.
Chinese panels have made gratifying progress in challenging South Korea's OLED panel technology with miniLED technology in the TV industry, which has brought enormous pressure to Korean counterparts in the high-end TV market.
The data for 2022 shows that South Korea's dominant OLED TV shipments have hardly increased, and the OLED TV shipments are about 7.4 million units. The miniLED TVs promoted by Chinese TV companies have maintained rapid growth. Reached more than 3 million units.
The main supplier of OLED TV panels is South Korea’s LGD. LGD has been promoting OLED TVs for many years. However, OLED TVs have always had screen burn-in problems, which has made it difficult to expand the scale of OLED TVs, which has also hindered the development of LGD; Samsung Intending to solve the burn-in problem of OLED TVs, QD-OLED panel technology was proposed. However, Samsung’s QD-OLED panel mass production has been delayed because Samsung cannot determine whether QD-OLED can compete with Chinese TV companies’ push for miniLED technology.
China's leader in promoting miniLED TVs is TCL. TCL actually produces OLED panels, but the OLED panels produced by TCL are mainly for the mobile phone industry, while in the TV industry it is pushing miniLED. TCL is still the third largest TV company in the world, and has gradually narrowed the gap with LG in terms of sales volume. It can be said that TCL has brought enormous pressure to Korean companies both in terms of technology and sales.
In the domestic market, miniLED TVs have surpassed OLED TVs. In 2022, the shipments of miniLED TVs sold in the Chinese market have reached 395,000 units, a year-on-year increase of nearly four times; million units, far behind miniLED TVs.
miniLED technology is actually a transitional technology. The advanced panel technology that is considered to replace OLED technology is microLED. However, the technical difficulty of microLED is too high and the cost is too high. Therefore, Chinese panel companies choose to push miniLED with much lower technical difficulty first, and miniLED It is quite suitable for use on large-screen TVs, with high contrast and bright colors.
In the past ten years, South Korean TV companies Samsung and LG have been dominating the high-end TV market because they have advantages in TV technology, while Chinese TV companies can only struggle in the low-end and mid-end TV market, which also leads to the rather low profits of Chinese TV companies , The net profit of Chinese TV companies has been floating around 1.5%.
However, the Chinese panel industry successfully defeated South Korea in LCD panels, leading Samsung and LGD to withdraw from the LCD panel market one after another. The panel technology surpassed that of South Korea. With the rapid growth of miniLED TV sales sold by Chinese TV companies, it is very likely that miniLED technology will replace OLED technology. In this way, China will achieve the goal of overtaking in a corner.
South Korea is facing increasingly strong challenges from its Chinese counterparts in the high-tech industry. In addition to the panel industry, China has recently challenged South Korea in the memory chip industry. The competitive advantage in high-tech industries is continuously weakening, and it is hoped that Chinese manufacturing will gain advantages in more high-tech industries.