According to The Korea Times, the dominance of Korean companies in the global display market is being challenged as recent reporting data shows that the global OLED (organically-shelved) market share of Chinese companies has surpassed Korean companies for the first time in the first quarter of 2024.
Industry experts say that this change in position is due to China's "patriotic consumer" campaign, which has made Chinese smartphone manufacturers prefer domestic OLED screens to produce more.
Currently, major Korean industry companies such as Samsung Display, LG Display, ... are trying to maintain their leading position with high-end products compared to Chinese competitors. However, increasing competition in the market is causing many difficulties for the "big guys" from Korea.
According to data from market monitoring company Omdia, Chinese companies accounted for 49.7% of OLED shipments globally in the first quarter of 2024, while Korean companies accounted for only 49%. This data shows that China's OLED market share has surpassed Korea.
Previously, in the first quarter of 2023, Korean and Chinese companies held market share of 62.3% and 36.6%, respectively, maintaining a fairly large gap of 25.7 percentage points. However, the figure has rapidly shrunk to 9.5 percentage points in just three months. This gap continued to widen to 14.9 percentage points in the third quarter and 16.7 percentage points in the fourth quarter of the same year. However, the position was finally reversed in the first quarter of 2024.
If we only consider OLED's revenue, Korean manufacturers will maintain their dominating market share. This means that Samsung and LG maintain their strengths in high-value products, but the revenue gap is also narrowing rapidly.
According to Beijing Sino Research - a market monitoring company, Chinese screen manufacturers account for 50.7% of the OLED market for global smartphones in shipments in the first half of 2024. This means China will increase by 10.1 percentage points over the same period in 2023. However, the market share of Korean companies fell from 59.4% to 49.3% over the same period.
Since China launched its Made in China 2025 strategy in 2015, the country has pushed for improving the self-sufficiency of domestic industries, leading to major smartphone manufacturers using domestically produced OLED screens for their new products.
According to data from the Korea Scalp Industry Association, only 16% of smartphones made by Chinese manufacturers will use OLED manufactured by Korean companies in 2023. This figure clearly shows a sharp decrease compared to 77.9% in 2021 and 55.6% in 2022.
