LG's New Display Tech Hit Mass Production, Headed for iPhone

From DailyTech: LG Electronics, Inc.'s (KSC:066570) own Android-based smartphone product line is finally seeing some legitimate global success, but the company's biggest success in the smartphone market actually comes from its display business. LG Display, the world's second largest display manufacturer, produces the "Retina" (IPS type) LCD displays found in all Apple, Inc. (AAPL) iPads and iPhones, as well as some Android smartphones.

With Apple planning a major product launch for Sept. 12, which everyone is assuming will be the announcement of the iPhone 5 (the sixth generation iPhone), LG just announced that its latest and greatest display technology had hit mass production.

LG Display's latest innovation is to bake the capacitive touch sensors directly into the LCD layer; eliminating the need for a dual-layer two part display. In the short term this approach will allow for minor space savings and some power savings, as well. The downside is that the complexity of merging the two layers into a single layer means higher costs and decreased output.

Han Sang-beom, chief executive of LG Display, is quoted by Reuters, "We just began mass production and we don't expect any disruption in supplies."

One thing that may help LG Display from a supply perspective is that overall flat panel demand has been weak this year. Despite that weak demand, LG Display managed to grow its revenue by 14 percent on a year-to-year basis in Q2. But due largely to a $175M USD settlement in a U.S. price-fixing lawsuit, LG Display still was hit with a 112.3B won ($99.2M USD) loss in Q2 2012 versus a 21B won ($18.6M USD) profit a year ago. The price fixing lawsuit is actually not the first time LG has been implicated in criminal collusion; LG executives were actually sentenced to prison time back in 2009 for a similar conspiracy.

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