01-13 Week: Chinese New Year is coming, and as usual, let’s have a quick look what happened last week – Hon Hai and Sharp are expanding; Samsung expanding OLED production and might be launching foldable device this year; etc.
Chinese New Year is coming, and as usual, let’s have a quick look what happened last week:
Headlines:
- Samsung Electronics plans to supply its own Exynos chips to Audi starting from 2018
- TSMC’s chairman Morris Chang has said the company has not ruled out building a wafer fab in the US
- The EU launched a new project call LOMID (Large cost-effective OLED microdisplays and their applications)
- Hon Hai Precision Industry and its subsidiary Sharp might build a factory in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, to make OLED panels
- Solomon Systech and Nanjing CEC Panda have successfully developed the “World’s First” single-chip Touch and Display Driver IC (TDDI) supporting Full high-definition (FHD) (1080×1920) IGZO In-Cell panels
- LG Display announced a new smartphone display with QHD+ resolution (1440×2880)
- Samsung Display is considering a fresh investment worth USD2B in Vietnam to beef up production of OLED panels for smartphones
- Reportedly Samsung is expected to roll out more than 100K units of fold-out devices in 3Q17
- Sony has showcased CLEDIS large-size displays, signaling that commercial application of micro LED will soon take off
- Israeli startup Corephotonics, which is developing dual camera for smartphones, has completed a USD15M financing round
- SK Hynix has launched 8GB LPDDR4X mobile DRAM for flagship smartphones and other mobile devices
- It is rumored that China smartphone demand is slowing down. Huawei, OPPO and vivo has lower their orders for 1Q17, especially for OPPO, the decrease rate is about 30%.
Numbers:
- MediaTek announced that consolidated net sales for Dec. 2016 totaled NTD21.354B
- TSMC’s revenues for 2016 totaled NTD947.94B, rising 12.4% on year and hitting an annual high
- Qualcomm Snapdragon shipments largely increased in 1Q17 due to design wins from vivo and OPPO
- Strategy Analytics has predicted the foldable display market will reach 163M units by 2022 from 2.7M units in 2017
- Samsung has reportedly set a shipment goal of 60M in 2017 for its upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone, higher than that of its previous flagship models—S5 (45M), S6 (45M), and S7 (48M)
- Meizu has announced that the company has managed to ship out 22M smartphones in 2016, 2M out of which is outside China
- TrendForce forecasts that the annual global shipments of VR devices will reach 5.1M units in 2017 and grow to 8.5M in 2018
