Will Xiaomi buy OLED panels from Truly?
Xiaomi (pvt), the former darling of the Chinese smartphone brands, is said to be revamping its supply chain in order to allocate component purchases to a number of new suppliers, although they are expected to use use their internally developed Pinecone V670 CPU in a number of new models to be released next month. Among the potential new suppliers was Truly (732.HK), a Hong Kong based display producer that has been in production since the early 1990’s. Truly operates a Gen 4.5 OLED line that produces both rigid and flexible OLED displays for smartphones, wearables, and automotive applications, and is building a 2nd Gen 4.5 line of 60,000 sheets/month, although we believe the current fab also produces LCD based displays. Down the road, we believe Truly is considering the construction of a Gen 6 OLED fab but we do not believe final plans or financing has been determined to date and also produces PM OLED[i] devices on a Gen 2.5 line.
Xiaomi, which was once the upstart Chinese smartphone supplier that pushed aside major brands to take the number one sort on the mainland, now faces competition from OPPO (pvt), Huawei (pvt), Vivo (pvt) and others, and has fallen to 4th place in the Chinese market. Truly supplies, to varying degrees, displays to a wide variety of Chinese and overseas smartphone customers, so it would seem strange that Xiaomi would believe adding Truly would further differentiate their product unless they were able to garner a specially designed product from Truly, in particular an OLED product.
[i] Passive Matrix OLED – Different from current “Active Matrix” OLED which have a more sophisticated pixel addressing system.
Xiaomi, which was once the upstart Chinese smartphone supplier that pushed aside major brands to take the number one sort on the mainland, now faces competition from OPPO (pvt), Huawei (pvt), Vivo (pvt) and others, and has fallen to 4th place in the Chinese market. Truly supplies, to varying degrees, displays to a wide variety of Chinese and overseas smartphone customers, so it would seem strange that Xiaomi would believe adding Truly would further differentiate their product unless they were able to garner a specially designed product from Truly, in particular an OLED product.
[i] Passive Matrix OLED – Different from current “Active Matrix” OLED which have a more sophisticated pixel addressing system.
Table 1 - Chinese Smartphone Unit Share - Source: Counterpoint Research 2017
Table 2 - Truly Smartphone Customer list - Source: Company Data
RSS Feed