LG Display, Samsung Display to supply OLED screens for iPhones - report
South Korea's LG Display Co Ltd and the panel-making unit of Samsung Electronics Co Ltd will supply organic light emitting diode (OLED) screens for Apple Inc's iPhones, the Electronic Times reported on Wednesday citing unnamed sources.
Context & Ripple Effects
This late-2015 Electronic Times report is the opening move in a decade-long supply-chain arc: Apple signaling it would take OLED iPhones seriously while Samsung Display dominated the OLED market. The follow-on coverage shows how hard the second-source problem proved — by 2018, Apple's push to reduce its reliance on Samsung as sole OLED supplier had hit a hurdle from manufacturing problems at LG Display, before LG finally came on as a second supplier at modest initial volumes.
The endgame arrived years later: Apple committed to OLED across the entire iPhone line from 2025, pulling even budget SE models off LCDs and adding China's BOE alongside LG as suppliers. What reads in 2015 as a routine component win is actually the moment the display industry's center of gravity began shifting toward OLED.
First-order effects
- Samsung Display, already the OLED market leader, converts its technology lead into anchor iPhone volume — the 2017 orders alone reached roughly 160M panels including the $4.35B order for 60M panels, making Apple its marquee customer.
- LG Display gains a path into premium mobile panels but inherits immediate pressure: its early yield problems became the bottleneck in Apple's dual-sourcing plan, not Samsung's capacity.
Second-order effects
- Apple's demonstrated willingness to qualify new suppliers forces Chinese panel-maker BOE into the iPhone stack by 2024, turning a Korean near-duopoly into a three-way contest where price pressure lands hardest on LG's mid-volume position.
- LG Display's exit from large LCD manufacturing — selling its last big plant, Guangzhou, to TCL's CSOT for about $1.54B — follows directly from this pivot: capital and fabs migrate to flexible OLED as LCD TV panels commoditize.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, flagship smartphone displays consolidate into an oligopoly of two Korean firms plus one Chinese challenger, with Apple's sourcing decisions functioning as the de facto industrial policy deciding which panel makers survive at scale.
- The single-sourcing-to-qualified-arc playbook Apple ran here — sole supplier, second source, then full-line conversion — becomes the template for how it manages any critical component monopoly, keeping pricing leverage with the buyer.
The trend: Smartphone displays are completing a structural migration from LCD to OLED, with Apple's multi-sourcing cadence transforming a Samsung monopoly into a Korean-Chinese oligopoly.