Fearing a shortage of driver chips, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, and Apple have planned to sign early contracts with Samsung for the purchase of OLED displays for 2022, ijiwei.com said on April 16, citing supply chain sources.
In terms of orders, Xiaomi is very aggressive in sourcing a lot of flexible OLEDs from Samsung Display, meaning the company will hit the mid-to-high-end market in 2022, the report said.
As wafer capacity is tight and driver chips have been out of stock, cell phone giants prefer to work with panel makers that have a stable supply to secure their supply chains, the report said, citing Sima Qiu, an analyst at Magirror Research.
Samsung Display not only has the largest cell phone OLED panel production capacity but also has a stable supplier of driver chips Samsung LSI and Magnachip, so it is favored by Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, Sima said.
In general, cell phone manufacturers will first develop new models, and then purchase OLED panels according to the new models.
But due to the shortage of driver chips, cell phone makers choose to grab premium resources first and then develop new models based on them, the report said, citing supply chain sources.
In the case of a shortage of drive chip resources, high-quality resources will be gathered to the cell phone giants, and small cell phone manufacturers will face a more severe survival test in 2022, the report said.
Xiaomi TVs see rare price hike due to factors including chip shortage
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