December 13, 2011 1:45 am
What do disparate tablet devices like the Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle Fire, and Barnes & Noble Nook all have in common? They depend on South Korea’s LG Display as the main supplier of their display panels—a coveted distinction that has made the company the top supplier of media tablet screens, according to an IHS iSuppli Small & Medium Displays Market Tracker report from information and analysis provider IHS.
Samsung Mobile Display, which also supplies Apple with displays as well, follows with 35 percent, and Chimei Innolux, another Apple supplier, with 9 percent. All others shipped just 5 percent of all tablet panels in the second quarter of this year.
LG Display, branch of the Korean manufacturer dedicated to screens, is the main supplier of the screen of the iPad from Apple, Kindle Fire of Amazon and other Nook from Barnes & Noble, according IHS iSuppli. If this is the case, it is primarily the quality of the touch screens IPS (reactivity, open angles, power consumption) that manufactures LG in diagonals of 7″ to 10″. So that in the second quarter of year, the market share of LG screens on tablets rose to 51% according to iSuppli.
“Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble have very different offerings in the media tablet market – but they all depend on LG Display because of its advanced in-plane switching (IPS) display technology,” said Vinita Jakhanwal, senior manager of small and medium displays at IHS. “LG Display’s amorphous silicon LCD panels utilizing IPS technology offer faster response speeds, wide viewing angles up to 179 degrees, and no after image—all while consuming 30 percent less power than conventional LCDs.”
IHS forecasts tablet shipments to climb by 273 percent this year compared to 2010. However, the firm said that display suppliers will have to keep pace with the growing resolution in tablet displays. While 9.x-inch displays currently have a typical pixel density of 132 ppi (1024×768) and 7-inch tablets are at 170 ppi (1024×600), the next 9.x generation and Apple’s iPad retina display may exceed 300 ppi, IHS said. “Panel suppliers that cannot meet these exacting display standards or efficiently produce viable displays at such sizes and resolutions will find it very hard to compete in the market,” IHS said.
LG Display is the leader by a wide margin of the tablet display market, with 51 percent market share in the second quarter. The company is well ahead of fellow South Korean rival Samsung Mobile Display—which also supplies panels for the Apple iPad as well for its own Sam-sung Galaxy Tab—at a distant second with 35 percent share, half that of LG. Third-place Chimei Innolux Corp. of Taiwan, another Apple supplier that likewise provides for the Chinese white-box market, controls a 9 percent share, as shown in Figure 1. The remaining 5 percent of the tablet display market is split among several smaller firms.
From the time the iPad was introduced last year by Apple, tablet devices have become one of the main driving forces for growth in the small- and medium-sized display market. Tablet shipments are expected to surge an astounding 462 percent this year compared to 2010. And at a time when sales of many con%C