Giants Have Expanded Production To Grab A Position, Mini LED Enters The First...
As terminal giants such as Huawei, Apple, and Samsung have successively launched Mini LED series products, from the perspective of the industry, the commercial progress of Mini/Micro LEDs has been significantly accelerated.
A few days ago, Apple brought three new products at the second autumn new product launch conference in 2021, including the new Macbook Pro known as endorsement, which uses a Mini LED screen, supports 120Hz ProMotion technology, and has a peak brightness of 1600 nits. , The contrast ratio is 1 million to 1.
Wang Fei, vice president of industry research at TrendForce, told a reporter from China Business News that Mini LED is expected to usher in an obvious cycle of heavy demand this year and next, and it will enter the stage of industrialization in a true sense.
As terminal giants adopt Mini LEDs one after another, the commercialization of the industry is accelerating, and all links in the LED industry chain are moving in response to the trend, and they want to take advantage of the expansion of production to seize the market.
Dachang enters the game
Mini LED is defined as: LED device with chip size between 50~200μm. In layman's terms, Mini LED is a single LED with a smaller volume. As the unit volume becomes smaller, the number of devices on the display screen of the same area will be greatly increased.
Especially in backlight applications, Mini LED can replace mainstream LCD display backlights. It has the advantages of energy saving, light and thin, ultra-high contrast, wide color gamut, and second-level response speed, which greatly improves the display effect of the panel and its service life It is close to or even surpasses OLED.
According to market research organization Million Insights, the global Mini LED market will reach US$5.9 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 86.6% from 2019 to 2025. According to IHS forecasts, global Micro LED display shipments will reach 15.5 million units in 2026, with an average annual compound growth rate of 99%.
In fact, since 2019, manufacturers in the panel industry have successively launched Mini LED products, such as TV displays, computer displays, and car displays. However, due to factors such as low technology maturity and high cost compared with LCDs at that time, the initial development of Mini LED was slower than expected by the industry, and the shipment volume only hovered in the order of 10,000 units.
But since the beginning of 2021, Mini LED terminal products have begun to land one after another. As early as the April spring conference, Apple launched a new generation of iPad Pro 2021 equipped with Mini-LED technology. Three months later, Huawei also launched its own Mini. The LED product-Hongmeng flagship TV V75 Super, uses Huawei's self-developed Super Mini LED precision matrix backlight solution.
As two major manufacturers in the consumer electronics field, Huawei and Apple have introduced their products to Mini LED, making this panel technology quickly "popular". After that, Samsung, LG, TCL, and Skyworth also followed suit.
In this regard, Wang Fei said that despite the early development and layout of Mini LED, there are many factors involved in industrialization, including the exploration and improvement of many production processes, and the optimization and screening of technical solutions will take time. To grow up, the progress and follow-up of supporting industries will also take time. Before entering the stage of large-scale commercialization and mass production, small-scale production and sales are required for trial and error correction. This process is likely to take several years. At present, the results of the efforts of the upstream and downstream of the Mini LED industry chain are gradually Started to cash out.
China Securities Investment Research report also stated that “Mini/Micro LED technology has experienced more than ten years of development and is gradually maturing. Micro LED technology began to sprout in 2006 and was gradually introduced into the market in 2012. Mini LED took the lead in the industry in 2018. In 2020, it will cross the inflection point of the Gartner curve and enter the growth period. We expect that the second half of 2021 to 2022 will be a key time point for Mini LED mass production. As technology progresses and product yields mature, brand manufacturers have deployed , The penetration of Mini LED is accelerating. At the same time, Micro LED technology is also constantly breaking through, and the maturity of the industry chain is constantly improving. It is expected that there will be a heavy volume from 2023 to 2024."
Impact OLED?
The sudden emergence of Mini LEDs poses a threat to OLEDs that have been cultivated in the market for a long time. Discussions about Mini LED and OLED, the current mainstream display technology, are also beginning to raging.
In the initial stage of the market, Mini LED is considered to be just a transitional product from LCD to Micro LED.
Starting from the traditional CRT technology, the display panel industry has gone through the eliminated plasma technology and currently the most important LCD technology, and is now developing in the direction of OLED.
Because the OLED panel uses self-luminous organic materials, the processing of black has reached a level close to "pure black", and the contrast of the picture has also been improved. At the same time, in terms of the viewing angle of the screen, OLED TVs have a larger viewing range than LCD TVs with backlights, and the viewer's visual experience will not change due to different prescriptions.
However, OLED's high price and relatively short lifespan, compared with home TV products with an average lifespan of more than ten years, the problem of easy screen burn has become the "Achilles' heel" for its capture of the high-end TV market.
On the contrary, Mini LED has lower cost and longer service life than OLED, and can effectively avoid the risk of screen burn. With this excellent feature, Mini LED has suddenly emerged and quickly gained the "heart of the market."
JW Insights believes that in the medium and long term, Mini LED TVs have huge market prospects and will become the standard for LCD TVs. With the reduction in the cost of Mini LED backlight modules and the upgrading of technology, the price of Mini LED TVs is gradually approaching that of traditional LCD TVs. By then, Mini LED TV sales will surpass OLED TVs and become the mainstream of the mid-to-high-end TV market.
Wang Fei told reporters that in the short-term mismatch between Mini LED and OLED, there may be more conflicts in the long-term.
Heavy money
Due to the continuous growth of terminal demand, the entire LED industry chain has exerted one after another, and the battlefield of Mini LED is becoming more and more intense.
According to LED inside statistics, the total planned investment in Mini/Micro LED display technology-related projects in 2020 is about 25.2 billion yuan, which is a multiple of that in 2019. With the progress of industrial chain process technology and the improvement of production yield, the cost of Mini/Micro LED is expected to continue to decline, which will further promote the acceleration of the process of Mini/Micro LED industrialization. According to Trend Force's forecast, the cost of Mini LED backlights will drop by 15% to 20% per year.
Among them, on the chip side, many Mini LED products of Jucan Optoelectronics can be mass-produced through customer verification; On September 21, the leading apparel company Pathfinder announced the acquisition of 60% of Beijing Xinneng's equity and cross-border layout of Mini/Micro LED. San'an Optoelectronics announced on September 29 that it intends to privately issue shares, raising 7.9 billion yuan to invest in the Hubei San'an Mini/Micro display industrialization project and supplement working capital.
It is reported that Hubei San’an Mini/Micro display industrialization project has a total investment of 12 billion yuan, of which 10.257 billion yuan is fixed asset investment and 1.743 billion yuan is the initial working capital. It is planned to invest 6.9 billion yuan in raised funds, of which 6.1 billion yuan will be used for fixed asset investment. . The construction period of the project is 5 years, and the production period is 8 years. After the completion of the project, the production of Mini/Micro LED gallium nitride chips, Mini/Micro LED gallium arsenide chips, and 4K display packaging is one of the core strategic plans of Sanan Optoelectronics in the high-end LED field.
Sanan Optoelectronics stated that in order to solve the current problems of the mass production yield and display effect of Mini LED COB, the company puts the research and development direction on the new Mini LED COB packaging materials, processes and equipment. The company has successfully developed a new Mini LED RGB display module manufacturing technology, including Mini LED electrode technology, anisotropic conductive solder technology, hot-pressure reflow technology and related supporting equipment, and has accumulated a number of matching invention technologies. The company's Mini LED has entered the display field, and the backlight field is already in business docking.
In addition, TCL, Skyworth, etc. have also launched the entire Mini LED industry chain layout, and conducted research and development in Mini LED chips, transfer technology, and drive modules.
In May of this year, Skyworth invested 6.5 billion yuan to develop the Mini LED Display Industrial Park project in Wuhan, integrating the research and development, production and sales of Mini LED chips, backlight modules, and ultra-high-definition display terminals. After completion, the output value is expected to exceed 10 billion yuan.
As for the major chip manufacturers in the LED industry chain to accelerate the deployment of Mini LED production capacity, Wang Fei told reporters that at present, the main chip manufacturers already have the technology for mass production, and they have reserved enough production capacity to respond to the market. need. But at the same time, we must also reserve enough additional production capacity to cope with the incremental demand that erupts at any time.
