Wired
Recently, I replaced my “ten-year-old phone” and was about to update it. As a result, when I opened the latest mobile phone review, the sentence “Fuck” got stuck in my throat.
▼In a subjective evaluation, domestic screens and Samsung played back and forth
The times seem to have changed, and the progress of domestic screens in recent years has really far exceeded our imagination.
Domestic flagship models have used domestic screens one after another, and even become the focus of publicity.
For example, Huawei Mate 50 uses flexible OLED screens from BOE and Visionox;
The Honor X40 uses OLED curved screens from Tianma and Visionox;
The recently popular OnePlus mobile phone also uses BOE’s flexible OLED screen.
The K60 series launched by Redmi is equipped with China Star Optoelectronics’ first flexible 2K OLED screen, and it has directly fought back and forth with Samsung in various values in the high-end field.
It’s a bit of a “domestic screen light”.
Is the domestic screen really on the rise? Judging from some data, there seems to be something.
From the previous “no Samsung, no flagship”, it is now a major trend for domestic screens to move towards flagship models.
Coupled with the decline in the mobile phone market this year, in the OLED market representing mid-to-high-end screens, the proportion of Chinese manufacturers has broken through to 30%, which is half more than last year’s 20%.
It seems that domestic screens are gradually regaining the right to speak in the high-end OLED field.
▼It even started to reverse output to Samsung
This made me wonder why the domestic screen, which was sprayed to death two years ago, suddenly stood up?
So I deliberately found an engineer friend of CSOT, and consulted the insider of this industry, and I learned that the rapid development of domestic mobile phone screens in recent years is actually the result of double progress after the cost reduction of the industrial chain and “technology approaching”.
In the words of Raytech, domestic screens can basically produce 80% of the effect of top-level screens at 50% of the cost.
But the distance from the top screen is still a little bit away.
But the good news is that Samsung is the only “hard bone” ahead of us.
So when can we stop being second? We have to figure out where the gap between us and Samsung is.
Let me talk about some cold facts first. Although our panel technology has lagged behind for many years, we actually entered the OLED field earlier than Samsung in the field of OLED, which represents the highest level of mobile phone screens.
In 2001, a group of researchers from Tsinghua University established Visionox and began to lay out OLEDs. The OLED production line was pulled out the following year, a year earlier than Samsung.
However, one is the faltering efforts of small domestic start-up companies, and the other is the strides made by Korean chaebols. The gap still exists objectively.
For example, in the mobile phone panel industry, any production line is an investment of tens of billions of RMB. Even Visionox, which has a top academic background in China, cannot “just open its mouth”.
Therefore, 20 years later, in the OLED field, Samsung will rank first in the world, and Visionox will rank fourth in shipments (taken from the data for the whole year of 2021). The core problem lies in lack of money.
If you don’t have money, then you can raise money. Under the background at that time, the most suitable partner is the local government.
Unfortunately, shopping malls are like battlefields. There are always those with vested interests who are not happy to see the breakthrough of China’s panel technology, so they frantically make troubles.
In 2005, Shenzhen vigorously developed the panel industry, and BOE expressed its willingness to provide technical support.
But at the beginning of the cooperation, due to communication problems, Sharp took advantage of the loopholes. Sharp told Shenzhen that BOE’s technology is limited, so it is better to cooperate with me.
Unexpectedly, after BOE was eliminated, Sharp turned to cooperate with Nanjing and put BOE together.
Since then, Sharp has repeated its old tricks, attacking BOE’s cooperation with local governments many times.
It was not until 2008 that BOE, which traveled far to the southwest, cooperated with the Chengdu Municipal Government to build the first 4.5-generation line in the southwest region.
Chinese screens are 3 years behind just because of a Sharp.
However, it was only a gap in time, so if you work harder, you may be able to recover it.
But Samsung will not wait for you stupidly. While Japan and South Korea are blocking China’s screen business, Samsung is burying its head in technological upgrading and building its own moat.
In the OLED manufacturing process, there is a device called an evaporation machine, which is responsible for “evaporating” the OLED organic light-emitting material onto the substrate, so this process has also become an extremely critical step in the OLED panel manufacturing process.
The only manufacturer capable of manufacturing high-precision vapor deposition machines is Tokki of Japan.
However, during the period of new technology exploration, it is often difficult. The initial yield rate of OLED screens was low and the cost was high, and a large number of manufacturers withdrew one after another. In 2006, Tokki even suffered a loss of 4.8 billion yen and was once facing bankruptcy.
However, Samsung couldn’t stand its unique vision, bet heavily on OLED, and continued to increase orders with Tokki. After 12 months of hard work, Tokki survived.
Thanks to such a “friend of life and death”, Samsung bought out all the production capacity of Tokki’s evaporation machine.
Similarly, Samsung has taken advantage of its forward-looking investment perspective and strong financial resources to include some of the upper reaches of the panel industry chain, including the 2K resolution metal mask technology mastered by “Dainippon Printing” and Hitachi Metal’s “Super Invar Board”. Full capacity and exclusive contracts for materials.
From key equipment to key components to key materials, Samsung has almost gained advantages in every key node of the OLED industry chain.
It is simply the “hexagonal warrior” in the field of OLED panels, and competitors almost write the word “despair” on their faces.
Fortunately, our panel companies were not frightened by this gap, and the development of panels was much luckier than that of chips, and we quickly embarked on the fast track of the panel industry.
One is that in the past two decades, we have caught up through the demographic dividend and the manufacturing industry. Everyone has some savings in their pockets, and they can vigorously engage in research and development if they have money.
As for Japan and South Korea, one is the long-term impact of the decade of Japan’s disappearance, and the other is that the economy is small and more susceptible to external interference.
Therefore, in the historical stages of the Internet bubble since 2000 and the crisis in 2008, Japan and South Korea have been hit a lot.
In addition, during the economic downturn, technology companies will give priority to abolishing innovative businesses that cannot see the future in the short term, and Japan and South Korea have entered a stage of technological contraction.
The mobile phone industry is a highly iterative industry, and the core technology is constantly changing, requiring high research and development and high investment to maintain its dominant position.
Therefore, in the nearly 10 years after 2000, the development of Japanese and Korean technology companies generally slowed down, or even lost.
To put it bluntly, this is the strength of the country that bought some time for the development of our technology companies.
Second, the industrial barriers created by Japan and South Korea through technology and patents are not iron walls.
The giants in the OLED industry chain each have their own ideas.
Apple, which has been subject to Samsung for a long time, wants to cultivate new suppliers. It is not a day or two.
Some analysts pointed out that if Apple wants to get rid of this situation, it must support a supplier to compete with Samsung.
From the current point of view, this candidate may be BOE.
South Korea’s LG is mainly focused on large-size OLEDs, and has no obvious advantage in small-size flexible OLED mobile phone screens, so it withdrew from the competition for mobile phone screens.
This gives domestic manufacturers room to catch up.
As the monopoly contracts between Samsung and major raw material manufacturers gradually expire in 2017 and 2018.
The core luminescent material patents of OLED screens will also expire in 2021.
The Chinese panel companies that have been chasing after them have finally seen the opportunity to catch up.
Advanced materials and equipment have begun to embrace domestic enterprises one after another, gradually improving the market position of domestic screens. Even conversely master the right to speak, and then get better equipment.
Especially in 2018, due to the development of domestic OLED screens, Samsung’s OLED shipments were affected, slowing down the pace of investment in OLEDs.
There was a surplus of vapor deposition machines that were originally covered by Samsung (in 2017, Tokki vapor deposition machines produced 7 units, Samsung bought 5 units, BOE bought one, and South Korea got one), and BOE, China Star Optoelectronics, etc. bought them one after another. Evaporation machines, domestic screens have made more breakthroughs.
Then through better domestic cost control to seize the market and gain more voice, a virtuous circle has been achieved.
As a result, in recent years, the focus of panel companies in Japan and South Korea has gradually shifted to the middle and upper reaches of the supply chain, and their competitiveness in the field of terminal screens has long been inferior to that of the past.
However, the advantages of Samsung’s upstream production materials and midstream production equipment are still not small.
What is more worth considering is that the development of the third-generation display technology (OLED) actually presents a similar historical process as that of the second-generation display technology (LCD):
In the early days of OLED, we fell behind, and Japan and South Korea formed mature products faster, eating the first pot of gold in screen replacement.
In the mature stage of OLED, we use the advantages of the industrial chain to reduce costs; Japan and South Korea use patent authorization, raw materials and equipment to lock in more profits in the industry.
At present, domestic OLED materials with independent intellectual property rights are far from achieving large-scale sales, and their market share is relatively low; while the inkjet technology for the countermeasures for evaporation machines is not mature enough.
There are only a handful of Chinese companies in the OLED core supply chain.
Based on this reasoning, it is difficult for us to guarantee that Samsung and other companies will not use the money earned from upstream technology advantages to engage in next-generation display technology and replicate this model again.
Therefore, under this current situation, domestic screens can indeed compete with Samsung screens, but it is far from the time to celebrate.
But we don’t have to be too pessimistic. The engineers of China Star Optoelectronics also told us that we still have irreplaceable advantages in certain fields.
For example, for the same under-display lens model, compared with domestic screens and Samsung screens, Samsung actually has a disadvantage. Comparing the display effects of Samsung and Mi MIX4’s under-display cameras at the same time, it is obvious that Samsung’s under-display display technology is far inferior to that of Xiaomi and Huaxing. The crystallization of photoelectric joint research and development.
Even, in the research and development of medium-sized OLED screens (mostly used in tablet computers), Samsung cannot easily switch to new technologies due to the high cost of investing in rigid OLED screens in the early stage. The required flexible screen route.
This is also the limitation of big factories.
Looking back at the development of China’s mobile phone panels, it’s like running a race again and again.
In terms of LCD technology, Japan and South Korea reached the end, and we just started. In OLED technology, Japan, South Korea and we have reached the end.
These 20 years of hard work have made us almost stand on the same starting line as Samsung, and then wait for the starting gun of the fourth-generation display technology.
Considering the experience of the previous two generations of technology catching up, I think the hard days of domestic screens have passed.