According to Omdia's latest market analysis report, shipments of LTPO (low-temperature polycrystalline oxide) OLED displays in smartphones are expected to grow significantly to 520 million units by 2031. This growth will bring LTPO OLED's share of the smartphone OLED display market to more than half to 52.0%, surpassing LTPS (low-temperature polycrystalline silicon) OLED technology.
Shipments of smartphone OLED displays are expected to increase by 28.8% in 2024 from 2023, breaking the 800 million, and are expected to exceed 1 billion units per year by 2031, according to Omdia. In terms of growth rate, LTPS OLED shipments are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of -1.0%, while LTPO OLED shipments are expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 8.0%.
Jerry Kang, Omdia's OLED & Emerging Display Market Research Manager, pointed out that LTPO OLED technology has lower leakage current than LTPS OLED, enabling lower display power consumption at refresh rates below 30Hz. This advantage has led more and more smartphone brands to choose LTPO OLED as a solution to reduce the energy consumption of their devices.
Figure: OLED display shipment forecast
Prior to 2020, almost all smartphone OLED displays were powered by LTPS driver technology. However, since Samsung Electronics first applied LTPO driver technology to the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra's OLED display in 2020, including Apple's iPhone 13 Pro/Pro Max (2021), Google's Pixel 7 Pro (2022), Motorola's Razr (2023), and Huawei's Mate A number of flagship smartphones, such as the X5 (2024), have started to adopt LTPO OLED technology. In addition, the application of LTPO OLED has also expanded from smartphones to smart watches and tablets, driving panel manufacturers to develop diversified LTPO driver circuits based on the characteristics of different OLED products.
Jerry Kang also mentioned that as smartphones increasingly integrate generative AI capabilities, efficient power management is becoming critical. Smartphone brands are expected to continue to look to improve the brightness and resolution of OLED displays while ensuring that these improvements do not significantly increase power consumption.
Omdia predicts that most of the new investments by panel manufacturers in small and medium-sized OLED capacity (Gen 6 and below) will be LTPO driver technology, and some of the existing LTPS OLED capacity will also be converted to LTPO OLED. When investing in large-scale OLED capacity (Gen 7 and beyond), such as tablets and laptops, LTPO and Oxide drive technologies are expected to become more competitive in terms of performance, capacity, and investment costs, and are expected to become competitive over the next 3 to 4 years.
