Samsung Quietly Losing To LG In Smartwatch, TV OLED Panel Supply Markets

LG has taken the lead from Samsung when it comes OLED exports, according to supply market studies. However, it’s not just LG that has shipped more than Samsung did in the past few years. Here’s what we know about this.

According to the Display Supply Chain Consultants study (via Digitimes), LG Display (LGD) has shipped 17.1 million OLED panels for its smartwatch devices, pushing them above Samsung, which shipped 11.5 million units. In addition, the Chinese firm Everdisplay Technology, which sold 15 million smartwatch display units, has also overtaken Samsung when it comes to OLED sales.

Aside from its smartwatch victory, LGD is also aiming to keep its lead on OLED TV sales as LG currently owns most of the shares in this market. Currently, LG plans to ship up to 3.8 million OLED TV units this year, which is a million more than their 2.8 million units in 2018. In a way, Samsung is losing to LG when it comes to these devices.

But even if the Korean company has been losing out on OLED TV and smartwatches, Samsung still has the lead over LG when it comes the mainline products of smart devices like smartphones. Currently, Samsung still has 85 percent of the smartphone market share for 2019, according to DSCC. Despite this large percentage, the Samsung shares are noted to be dwindling by the year as they had 99 percent of shares in 2016 and 94 percent just last year. For now, we’ve yet to know what Samsung is cooking up to make sure they keep these numbers up.

Potentially, Samsung might be focusing their efforts on the new frontier of “foldable display” smart devices this 2019. Among other companies, Samsung revealed their own foldable display smart device this CES 2019. Since foldable smartphones are particularly new in the industry, we might see Samsung cashing in on this new industry and owning it like they are doing right now with the regular smartphone market shares.

We’ll have to wait for Samsung and LG’s next move to see which one will keep their advantages in the long run.