LG Display goes for flexible display

South Korea’s LG Display Co Ltd said on Thursday that it will invest 1.05 trillion won ($908 million) to build a new local plastic organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display production plant, ramping up spending for the next-generation technology.

The decision was made at a board meeting on Wednesday, with the construction of the new facility, in the southern provincial city of Gumi, to be completed by the second quarter of 2017, the company said in a regulatory filing.

The investment accounts for 8.9 percent of the firm’s equity capital, it added.

LG Display not only is creating differentiated competitiveness in the mobile display market by offering more design formats only possible through the flexible OLED, but is laying the foundation for the growth of flexible OLED displays by establishing a full-scale 6th Generation production plant that produces large sized panels.

But it isn’t just the phone market that LG hopes will push demand for flexible OLED. In the same year, the company also started producing a 6-inch plastic flexible OLED for smartphones for the first time globally.

The flat panel maker runs two respective production lines in Gumi and Paju, north of Seoul.

LG Display said the new facility should be able to produce flexible displays that are “foldable”, as well as displays that could be applied in automobiles.

“It is very likely that the first flexible iPhone may be introduced in 2018, as Apple’s top-tier display suppliers are working on it, ” claimed Korean media sources last month, and that might be one of the reasons behind LG’s near-$1 billion investment.

The company is scheduled to release its second-quarter earnings later in the day, with its operating profit forecast to have almost tripled from a year earlier, according to analysts.

Mass production is not expected to begin until early 2017.