China's display industry, from catching up, and running to local transcendence.
Wen 丨 Hua Shang Tao Li Zhang Jingbo
Competition between countries is economic competition, but also industrial competition, the main body of competition is enterprises.
After the global liquid crystal display wrestling, Chinese manufacturers have gradually achieved the world's leading industrial scale and competitiveness.
This advantage is the result of more than ten years of perseverance under the strength of people and the weakness of others.
Li Dongsheng, who led TCL to become one of the world's LCD double males, proposed relevant bills as a deputy to the National People's Congress at the two sessions this year to continue to promote the strategic layout of China's display industry.
In the proposal entitled "Suggestions on Accelerating the Ecological Development of the New Display Industry", Li Dongsheng called for:
From the national level, strengthen the supporting capacity of the industrial chain, accelerate the development of some core materials, and accelerate the cultivation of a number of core equipment industries.
New display technology refers to the next generation of display technology represented by printed OLED, including printed OLED, QLED, Mini/Micro-LED, etc.
They, like liquid crystals (LCDs), belong to semiconductor displays.
Li Dongsheng proposed this bill, which is an initiative to attack the display industry under the new situation.
In the past 2020, the dust of the global LCD industry war has settled, and China's two giants TCL and BOE have finally won, dominating more than half of the global market.
The victory of Chinese manufacturers benefited from a decade of strategic layout and persistence, and finally crushed the opponent with cost and efficiency advantages.
In 2009, when Li Dongsheng, who was a color TV, decided to march into the upstream panel industry and try to smash the shackles that Japanese and Korean manufacturers put on the neck of China's color TV industry, the situation was not optimistic.
At that time, although domestic color TVs were booming, LCD panels were almost all imported, and the country was burdened with a huge trade deficit every year.
The only few LCD panel manufacturers, because of a large amount of financing, bear the name of "malicious circle money".
It was in this context that TCL began its own journey. In 2009, Huaxing Optoelectronics was established.
LCD panel is a heavy asset industry, a production line, investment of tens of billions of yuan. With his strategic foresight and heartfelt feelings, Li Dongsheng gritted his teeth and persevered.
10 years 7 production lines, including two 11 generation lines, such capacity expansion, rare in the industry.
Although scale brings cost advantages, scale alone is not enough to win, but also to be efficient.
TCL's efficiency is reflected in its industrial chain collaboration. By building factories in the same area, TCL can share infrastructure such as substations and bulk gas stations, while reducing the transportation cost of materials such as polarizers and glass substrates.
For example, the world's second largest glass substrate manufacturer, Japan's Asahi Glass, has built a factory in Shenzhen to support huaxing optoelectronics Shenzhen production line.
Supplying its TCL Electronics (the third largest global shipment of brand TVs) and binding large customers such as Samsung and Xiaomi further reduces the company's sales expenses.
The cost and efficiency advantages under these extreme management have delivered sufficient ammunition to TCL in the new round of global LCD panel production capacity showdown.
After 2017, with the great expansion of production capacity of Chinese manufacturers and the collapse of global LCD panel prices, Samsung and LG had to withdraw from the LCD market in batches because of losses.
Even in 2019, when the industry was at its lowest point, TCL Huaxing also maintained a rare profit in the industry, becoming the only panel company in the industry to maintain annual profitability.
In the end, TCL not only survived the trough, but also took advantage of the trend to gain a larger market share, becoming the second largest LCD production capacity in the world.
After achieving a stage victory, TCL took advantage of the victory and acquired the LCD factory and module factory of Samsung Suzhou in 2020.
The acquisition of Suzhou Samsung has enhanced TCL's voice in the global display industry chain. But this is only one part of Li Dongsheng's strategic chess game.
At the end of 2018, TCL Group at that time divested home appliance assets and focused on semiconductor displays; in January 2020, it changed its name to TCL Technology and completely transformed the technology industry group; in July 2020, it participated in the mixed reform of Zhonghuan Group and became the largest shareholder of Zhonghuan Semiconductor, one of the domestic monocrystalline silicon double males.
With this series of drops, TCL Technology has not only consolidated its position as a global LCD giant, but also further expanded its development space.
The withdrawal of Samsung and LG from the liquid crystal (LCD) market does not mean that they have abandoned the display industry. Instead, they have focused their resources on new types of displays such as OLED.
However, according to the prediction of authoritative institutions, in the next 5-10 years, large-size panels will still be the world of LCD.
After years of market cultivation, although OLED has occupied half of the small size market such as mobile phones, the penetration rate is still very low in large size markets such as TVs.
The reason is that the existing OLED evaporation technology is costly and difficult to implement, resulting in olED prices being 5-7 times that of liquid crystals.
The high price hinders the application of OLED in large-screen markets such as TVs.
Therefore, OLED, including size and size, still accounts for less than 30% of the output value in the global display industry, while LCD accounts for 73.8%.
For Chinese manufacturers who have just won the LCD war, the greater good news is that a new round of LCD capacity expansion is nearing the end.
In the coming years, new capacity will be limited. Even if a new project is launched, according to the law of the LCD production line, it will take two or three years from construction to production.
At this juncture, the withdrawal of Korean manufacturers has further tightened the supply side.
The average size of the world's TVs has steadily increased, and the demand for LCD panel capacity is increasing. The data shows that for every inch of tv size increased, the production capacity of a 10.5 generation line was consumed.
The change in supply and demand is reversing the pattern of oversupply of LCD panels in the past few years. Reflected in the market, from the second half of 2020, the price of LCD panels stopped falling and rebounded.
Although it is still difficult to predict how long this round of rally will last, it is undoubtedly a substantial positive for the Chinese panel industry and the double giants that have just won the dominance of the LCD industry.
Winning the LCD industry is an affirmation of Chinese manufacturers' catching up and surpassing in the past 10 years. Taking this as a lesson, the next generation of display technology must compete for opportunities through the first layout of technology and ecology.
In the field of OLED, Samsung and LG monopolize the global small size and large size markets respectively, and the production capacity of Chinese manufacturers is still very low.
Over the years, we've also been catching up.
According to data released by research institute DSCC, in 2017, Chinese manufacturers had less than 5% of the OLED market, and now it has risen to 36%. The share of South Korean manufacturers fell from 94% to 61%.
It is expected that in the future, the OLED market will be a pattern of equal division between China and South Korea.
Not only that, with the strength and growing wings of Chinese manufacturers are no longer satisfied with just catching up and running, but also began to strive to achieve transcendence in the next generation of technology.
At present, OLED mainly uses evaporation technology, because of the difficulty of the process and the high cost, it is inherently inferior in large-size applications.
Li Dongsheng did not confine himself to tradition and laid out the next generation of display technology in advance.
After setting the direction of technology in 2014, in 2015, he predicted in a speech titled "Displaying China's Power in the Wave of Industry":
"In large-scale applications, the application of printed display technology in OLED processes has the potential to develop a new generation of large-size display technology."
Based on this forward-looking judgment, TCL has invested in the next generation of display technology and materials for many years, initiated the establishment of Guangdong Juhua, and built a national innovation center for printing and flexible display; in June 2020, it also spent 2 billion yuan to invest in JoLED in Japan to carry out in-depth technical cooperation in the field of printing OLED and accelerate the commercial landing of printing display technology.
Compared with the evaporation technology, which requires the organic material to be heated and evaporated to the predetermined position after the metal mask template in a vacuum, the printing technology only needs to be like inkjet printing on paper, which is not only simple in process, but also saves raw materials.
Therefore, printed OLED is considered to be one of the best technical routes for the next generation of large-size displays in the industry.
Printed OLED is just one of TCL's bets on the future of display technology.
In the field of QLED and Mini/Micro-LED new display technology, TCL has a good performance. Among them, the number of patents published for quantum dot technology is 1199, ranking second in the world.
20 years ago, in the case of backward technology, Samsung defeated Japanese manufacturers such as Sharp with suicidal counter-cyclical investment, successfully topped the global LCD king, and began to lead new display technologies such as OLED.
Today's TCL is almost staging another "Samsung story".
Tactically, by constantly increasing revenue and doing large-scale, we can obtain stable cash flow.
Strategically, rely on stable cash flow and use Pan-Moore's Law for counter-cyclical expansion. In the end, with the advantage of high-generation production lines, step by step, we will approach the status of the liquid crystal oligarchy.
A similar scene has made the industry full of imagination about whether TCL can become the next Samsung.
However, Li Dongsheng soberly realized that although Chinese manufacturers are the first in the LCD display industry, there is a big gap between their overall strength and South Korea.
Samsung is withdrawing from the LCD market, which does not mean that it has given up the development of the display industry, but has concentrated its resources in the field of new displays.
"In terms of next-generation display technology development, we are trying to catch up... The competition is still ongoing. ”
In other words, Chinese manufacturers still have a long way to go in the field of new displays.
In this process, the integration of all parties in the industrial chain is one of the keys to achieving qualitative changes in China's display industry.
At this year's two sessions, Li Dongsheng put forward a proposal to accelerate the ecological development of China's new display industry, develop some core materials, and cultivate a number of core equipment industries.
In Li Dongsheng's view, only in this way can we keep pace with the international advanced level in the field of next-generation display technology.
More importantly, "semiconductor display equipment enterprises, a lot of integrated circuits are related." Therefore, strengthening the ecological construction of the new semiconductor industry will also have a corresponding role in promoting the ecological construction of the integrated circuit industry. ”
Due to its long-term outstanding contributions to the display industry in China and even the world, the International Society for Information Display (SID) recently awarded Li Dongsheng the "David Sarnoff Industry Achievement Award" in 2021.
This is the world's highest individual award for display technology, awarded only one person per year.
This heavy award is an affirmation of Li Dongsheng's active exploration in the display industry in the past twelve years.
Since founding Huaxing Optoelectronics in 2009, Li Dongsheng has led the company step by step to become a global leader with accurate industry judgment and far-sighted strategic investment.
Today, TCL has become the world's second largest LCD panel supplier, but Li Dongsheng still has a lingering complex in his heart, that is:
After China's display industry is enlarged, it will continue to become stronger, so that China will change from a "display power" to a "display power".
——END——
Welcome to pay attention to [Huashang Taoluo], recognize the heroes, and read the legend of Taoli.
All rights reserved, unauthorized reproduction is prohibited!
Some of the images come from the Internet
If infringement is involved, please contact to delete it