Samsung's Dominance in the Display Industry

The proliferation of displays of all sizes is one of the salient features of the emerging 21st century information age.  Mobile displays are a particularly important feature of this development, as smartphones become increasingly cheaper, more powerful and popular all around the world.  The accompanying illustration (click to see a full-size version) shows a flexible active matrix organic light-emitting diode (AM-OLED) display that Samsung sees as a major growth engine.  As reported in The Korea Times, Samsung Mobile Display (SMD)  was launched in January 2009 with an aim to lead the market in next-generation flat-screens (OLED) as Samsung was seeking breakthroughs in that area. SMD is dominating global demand for AM-OLED, which requires less power and provides clearer picture quality and a much faster response time than existing LCD displays. OLED screens are used in smartphones and other portable devices and SMD controls over 80 percent of the market, as shown in the graphic below. (click to see a full-size version)

Sales of Digital TVs Growing During Economic Slump

This is a follow up to the previous post about the new LED television sets being sold by Samsung Electronics.  As reported in the Chosun Ilbo and other papers today, sales of digital television sets are growing in the world's developed economies, despite the severe economic slump.  This reflects increased consumer spending on in-home activities and also defies the common sense idea that high end appliances do not sell well during an economic recession.  Another factor contributing to the sales is that governments worlwide have adopted policies for switching over to digital broadcasting.   Here in Korea the obvious beneficiaries of this global phenomenon are Samsung and LG Electronics, the world's leading manufacturers of flat screen digital television sets.

The Significance of Korea's New LED Displays

As outlined in a Korea Times story yesterday, Samsung Electronics has launched its new series of LED displays in the Korean market.  They are now available in all major world markets.  Coincidentally, my wife and I purchased a 52 inch Samsung LCD television about a month ago, and have been enjoying it immensely.  We have no buyer's remorse since we purchased the HD TV-ready, top-of-the-line set at a competitive price and will be able to enjoy it for years.  A new LED model would have cost about $1,000 more (we paid about $2,200 for ours).  However, the new LED models are thinner....much thinner, lighter and are also 40 percent more energy efficient, while rendering colors slightly better than our new television set.  This morning, just before coming in to work, I watched live coverage of the Arnold Palmer Invitational from Florida as Tiger Woods sunk a long putt on the final hole to win.  Watching it on the 52" LCD television was so much more fun than on our old, smaller CRT television.
As readers of this blog will know, I'm currently doing my own research on the information and communication revolution in Korea.  In the broad context of this nation's efforts to build an information society, what is the significance of LED televisions and the display industry more generally?   I suggest the following for starters.

• The display industry is a core or "anchor" technology of the information age.  This will continue into the future as sight and visual images are such a major component of human communication.  The closer the actual image on a display is to real human vision, the more realistic the viewing experience will be.
• Korea's growing strength in the semiconductor industry complements its work with displays.  In fact, the manufacturing process for displays is very similar to that for semiconductors.
• By introducing the LED line of televisions now, Korea's companies will have a big edge over their competitors when the global market for these devices reaches economies of scale.  There are as yet no major Japanese, North American or European competitors in the display market.
• From the standpoint of ordinary consumers around the globe, there is no doubt that once the price reaches an acceptably low level, many will trade in their "old" LCD television sets for a newer, lighter, greener and more "fun to view" set.

In short, South Korea's leadership in the display industry is integral to its overall development as a global ICT leader.

New York Times: "Big Step Forward for Flexible Electronics"

The discovery made news rather quickly and now the New York Times has picked up the story.  A research team from Sungyunkwan University and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology has developed a technique for making stretchable, thin electrodes out of graphene.  As the New York Times article put it "Graphene is a single-layer sheet of carbon atoms (the building block, in fact, of the graphite used in pencils) and has properties that make electronics engineers swoon. But making graphene sheets of a practical size has proved problematic." In addition to being nearly transparent and having excellent electrical characteristics, the films this research team has developed are unaffected by bending or stretching. And the researchers say the process is scalable, so relatively large films can be made.  More on this development in later posts.

"Job Creation 7 Times Slower Than Economic Growth"

An article in today's Korea Times quickly caught my eye with the headline "Job Creation 7 Times Slower than Economic Growth." Fundamentally, this is all due to the advances in communication technology that started in the 1980s and are now bearing fruit. The newspaper article quotes an official from the Ministry of Strategy and Finance as saying ``Korea's industrial structure has transformed into a technology-and capital-dependent one from a labor-intensive one. Manual jobs have largely been moved to China and other Asian economies in which labor costs are much cheaper than here. The economy is expanding without creating as many jobs as it used to." This Ministry official's reference to technology really refers to information and communication technologies (ICT), more than any others. Even more specifically, I would note that there are four key anchor technologies in the fields of industrial and consumer electronics that underpin South Korea's economy today. They are:

• Semiconductors
• Flat screen displays including color television displays.
• Mobile handsets and other devices.
• Electronic switching systems which are key components of digital networks.

As shown in the accompanying graphic, employment elasticity ― the job growth rate divided by output growth rate ― fell to an all-time low of 0.15 in the second quarter of the year, down from 0.25 in the same period last year.