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Samsung Announces What It WON’T Be Making

It’s InfoComm season and the PR blitzes are in full-force announcing new products that will be available to see LIVE in Las Vegas next week.

We’re used to this being a period of time for product announcements and merger and acquisition news, so it was unique to see a company make an announcement about what they won’t be making anymore.

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Samsung announced this week that it will no longer be making its own LCD panels as of June 2022. This doesn’t mean that the company is getting out of the LCD display market altogether; what it does mean is that if you buy a commercial Samsung display, the LCD layer inside that display will have been made by someone else.

This isn’t a new decision. Samsung actually decided to exit LCD manufacturing in 2020, but with an increased pandemic demand, delayed the exit until 2022. Now, the time is here.

Honestly, I am not surprised by this news at all. In fact, seven years ago I wrote an article about how LCD manufacturing on the panel level was a losing venture. If you want to take a peek at that article, check it out here.

Interestingly enough, since that post was written, the two companies I mentioned, Sharp and NEC, merged. It would have been interesting to sit in on those early meetings considering their wholly different approaches to the LCD manufacturing issue.

To bring things full circle, it has been reported that Samsung may be buying some of it’s new LCD panels from Sharp. Go figure.

Regardless of who actually makes the LCD layer, flat panels are still in high demand at increasingly larger sizes for meeting rooms and digital signage.

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Make sure to visit both Samsung and Sharp NEC at InfoComm ’22 next week.

Samsung is at Booth N1445

Sharp NEC is at Booth N2305

 

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