Taiwan and South Korea's LCD Market-Share Battle

prostoalex writes: "This lengthy article on Reuters Web site, filled with numbers and analyst references, talks about Korean and Taiwanese manufacturers starting a price war in the field of LCD. Apparently, last year all Taiwan-based manufacturers lost money, while Koreans made money, and the companies are ready to slash their prices in turn for market share." From my reading of the article, it looks like the manufacturers may actually be reluctant to trade profits for market share, but this kind of competition still sounds good for LCD buyers.

Comments

Cornea

[kisrael]

I recently got an 18" Cornea flatpanel. It's great, a terrific monitor at the price of the other guy's 17". I suppose some might balk that it only has VGA analog inputs, but that's all I'm ready for anyway.

I think the company is Korean, maybe did some work for OEMs, and now they're out on their own.

Probably all psychosomatic, but it feels great to only be beaming myself with hours and hours of CRT radiation at work, not at home...

you call it 'lenghty article'?

[porky_pig_jr]

do you suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder or something like that?

Better safe than sorry...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Enjoy yourself and your new monitor!

If you're going to listen to this advice then I hope you've got a box of screen cleaning wipes handy.

Samsung

[HisMother]

The Korean company Samsung has a lot to do with this, I think. They absolutely own the high end market. I'm lucky enough to have a Samsung 240T, which is a 24" diagonal unit that can do 1920x1200 and can mix the digital and analog inputs (picture in picture). At $4995 (almost two years ago) it wasn't cheap, but it's rock solid, gorgeous, has an incredible viewing angle, and nothing else came close (at the time, anyway). Samsung used to have a rep as a crapfacturer, but these days they've really come up in the world.

....price wars are not that good.

[jukal]

selling products under own costs is not any good for the consumer in the long run. They are not lowering the prices to do common good. Instead they do it to kill the other one and make bigger profits later by raising prices.

Re:....price wars are not that good.

[fermion]

The effect of price wars really depends on the industry. It the case of LCD display panels, I can only see it as good.

In my limited experience, I have never seen the sale price go below the base cost to manufacture that product, that is, the cost to run it through the assembly line, package it, and ship it out. What will happen, however, is that the market may not support the inclusion of research, management, and other ancillary costs. Now, if the company is well run, there will be other, generally more advance products, that can be sold to support the ancillary costs, and of course profits.

I believe this relates directly to the LCD market. It should be possible for companies to aggressively price smaller LCD monitor (less that 17"), while shifting the other cost to the bigger sizes. In fact, by keeping price of the smaller sizes unnecessarily high they limit the number of consumer who are going to shift from CRT to LCD technology, thus limiting the growth of future demand.

The LCD manufacturers are further shooting themselves in the foot by allowing the CRT manufacturer to rapidly increases the minimum acceptable monitor size, right now about 19" for about $200. The CRT manufacturers clearly understand how to use aggressive prices to keep a market. I hope the LCD manufacturers, which is rapidly becoming a very mature market, have a price war so they can learn how use such pricing to take market share.

Re:Holy cow!

[Dr. Ion]

Same here.. I couldn't get a GeForce2 or PNY GeForce3 to drive the DVI on an FP2000 without speckle and snow, even at lower resolutions.

A PNY GeForce4 4200 did the trick, though. Tack-sharp 1600x1200, no problem.

I'm starting to wonder if DVI isn't so standardized.

Sounds good to me!

[bruthasj]

As a software engineer/lead dude in Taiwan, i feel that the more fabs outputting the merrier. I keep my job and everyone stays happy -- obviously the customer will benefit the most from such a competitive environment. Kinda like the RAM market was a few years back.

Right now I'm working on Acer-Unipac Line 8 which is a 5G (fifth generation) outfit that put's out glass beginning in the 21" form-factor. The previous fabs like L6/L5 will pick up speed in the 17" arena. I think Samsung's newest place in Korea is also 5G and was up and running well before Acer.

The next 5G fab coming up is Chimei Fab 3 in Tainan . Both the Acer and Chimei fabs will be rolling full production by next spring. This will bring TV-class LCD panel prices down quite a bit.

The carrier sizes for these babies are huge -- I mean like the size of your regular cubicle. Good ole wafer fabs you used to be able to hand-carry the product around. These you need a forklift. But since they don't have any "clean" forklifts they have to use these funky $60,000 USD handcarts that move them around.

Anyway, I'm blabbing ... but just remember AUO Fab 8 and Chimei Fab 3 in Taiwan coming up soon. LG / Samsung has one 5G running as we speak and probably another one coming soon. In fact, I heard AUO Fab 9 will be done by the end of next year...

So, I probably said too much, but I didn't sign any NDA, so I don't care...