THE KOREA ECONOMIC DAILY, GLOBAL EDITION

LG Display Co., the world’s top organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panel maker, is seeking to supply a next-generation tandem OLED display for vehicles to British luxury automaker Bentley Motors Ltd. and 11 other global carmakers.

The South Korean display maker is jointly developing the third-generation automotive tandem OLED with the partners, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

The vehicle partners include Cadillac, the luxury brand of General Motors Co. (GM), and Genesis, the premium brand unit of Hyundai Motor Co., sources said.

No concrete supply deals are in the works yet, they said.

A tandem OLED, also known as a stacked OLED, is a type of screen technology that makes displays brighter and last longer. Traditionally, OLED screens have only one layer that emits light. In a tandem OLED, multiple light-emitting layers are stacked on top of each other.

LG said last month it has begun mass-producing 13-inch tandem OLED displays for laptops, the first of its kind in the display industry.

The company developed the industry’s first tandem OLED display in 2019 – one mainly used as automotive screens.

According to market research firm Omdia, global annual tandem OLED display shipments are forecast to jump to 71.8 million units by 2031 from an estimated 8.1 million in 2024. The tandem OLED display market is expected to grow to $9.9 billion from $2.5 billion over the same period.

LG Display is also developing a vehicle exterior display with a maximum brightness of 5,000 nits – the industry’s highest – for a launch sometime next year.

One nit is the brightness produced by a single candle.

The new automotive display will be ideal for commercial vehicles, including taxis, as well as passenger cars, industry officials said.

K-DISPLAY 2024

On Wednesday, LG Display, its crosstown rival Samsung Display Co. and other display-related companies said they are participating in K-Display 2024, Korea’s largest display exhibition organized by the Korea Display Industry Association.

At the expo, held at COEX in southern Seoul for three days from Wednesday, LG is showcasing several new OLED technologies for automotive and other applications.

LG said its 83-inch OLED TV panel is the brightest screen of its kind that features META Technology 2.0, a new technology it developed through a decade of OLED evolution.

The panel improves screen brightness by 42% compared to the previous generation and achieves a maximum brightness of 3,000 nits, it said.

LG said META Technology 2.0 offers rich, true-to-nature colors and brightness levels that are as vivid and three-dimensional as those seen with the human eye.

FULL LINEUP OF GAMING OLED PRODUCTS, ATO OLED

LG also unveiled a full lineup of its gaming OLED products that maximize immersion, including panels with sizes of 27, 31.5, 34, 39 and 45 inches.

Its gaming OLED panels also use META Technology 2.0, it said.

The 45-inch gaming OLED, which uses LG’s bendable OLED technology, allows the screen to bend up to a curvature of 800R or the same degree of curve as a circle with a radius of 800 mm, according to LG.

The company also unveiled ultra-large automotive displays optimized for software-defined vehicles (SDVs), including low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) LCD.

LG said its 17-inch advanced thin OLED (ATO) for information display provides information on a large screen while enabling the easy operation of vehicle functions. The ATO is 20% thinner than conventional OLED, facilitating a sleek design, ultra-high-definition image quality and a reasonable price range.

LG Display’s 18-inch slidable OLED for vehicles is normally hidden in the backseat ceiling when the screen is curled up, but it slides down when users want to watch movies and hold video conference calls, it said.

Meanwhile, Samsung Display unveiled 42 innovative products related to artificial intelligence at K-Display 2024.

Its products include Flex In & Out, a 360-degree foldable display; Flex S, a multi-fold display that can be folded twice, both inwards and outwards in an S shape; Flex Hybrid, which boasts foldable and slidable technologies.

Write to Jeong-Soo Hwang and Chae-Yeon Kim at hjs@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.