Samsung could provide 4x as many OLED iPhone displays in 2018

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iPhone 7
Apple started selling OLED iPhones this year with the iPhone X.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

Samsung Display will continue churning out OLED displays for Apple in 2018, with a reported 180 – 200 million flexible OLED iPhone panels scheduled to ship next year, a new report claims.

That’s around 4x the estimated 50 million OLED panels that Samsung supplied Apple with in 2017, which suggests that Apple is planning on expanding its number of OLED handsets in the new year.

Samsung brokered its original deal to produce OLED displays for the iPhone in late 2015, although it took until 2017’s iPhone X for Apple to actually ship a smartphone with an OLED display.

The new 2018 deal is great news for Samsung, which generates an increasing amount of its revenue by making Apple components. According to calculations by IHS Market, Samsung charges Apple $110 per OLED display, which includes both the cover glass and touch sensor price. As such, the revised deal could bring in anywhere from $19.8 billion to $22 billion in revenue for Samsung.

Samsung has reportedly now refined its OLED production for iPhone. Earlier this year, Samsung’s panel production lines were achieving around 60 percent yield rate, which has since increased to almost 90 percent.

In addition to Samsung, it has been rumored that Apple may do a deal for OLED displays with Samsung’s rival display maker LG Display. LG has previously supplied Apple with LCD displays, and seems like it is confident that it will soon receive OLED business from Apple as well. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has suggested that LG is likely to supply 10-20 percent of the iPhone’s OLED supply by 2019, and 20-30 percent by 2020.

Source: The Investor.kr

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