Revolution Number Nine: Apple, Google, Taiwan, Korea...

From Digitimes:

4Q12 trends in the Greater China touch panel industry

In the global touch panel market, handset applications will account for the highest proportion of shipments at 76.2% in 2012. In second-half 2012, the main change in the handset touch screen market is the release of Apple's iPhone 5 that uses in-cell touch screen technology. The supply chain for Apple's panels will be shifted from Taiwan-based panel makers to Japan and Korea- based ones, which will cause shipments for panels used in handsets to decrease for Taiwan-based panel makers from 41.3% in first-quarter 2012 to 26.9% in fourth-quarter 2012.
Global touch panel shipments by application, 2010-2012 (k units)
Additionally, China-based panel makers will benefit from low-priced handsets in China. Due to such handsets having strict cost requirements, they will be beneficial for China-based touch screen makers. This will allow the makers' shipments of touch panels used in handsets to increase from 32.7% in first-quarter 2012 to 39.4% in fourth-quarter 2012.
This is about the split between Taiwan Display Engineers and the "old rivalry" between South Korea and Japan.  Apple will probably try to keep developing more expensive touch displays with some micro-improvement.  They will try to use Apple software to make sure people use it.  It was the Apple way of the 1990s, to shun "cheap" PC-clone manufacturers which manufacture for the "Good Enough Market".



However, Google Android is a very nice OS, and it's extremely "accessible".   Apple probably realizes that the strategy of pulling their work into the OECD Japan-Korea manufacturing system will be somewhat futile, but perhaps in the short term can get some concessions from Taiwan-Shenzhen manufacturers like Han Hoi Precision (Foxconn), Wistron, BenQ, and a thousand other up-and-comers.

Apple is still really hot, has a lot of money and clout from new orders.  But my HTC Evo 4G is still the bees knees, and if Apple's strategy is to charge $500 per phone/pad, the $45 Android tablets found last week at retain in Shenzhen will have something to say about that.

I have a lot of really interesting (to me) thoughts about the implications of Chinese touchscreen production for  the reverse-engineering, tinkering, reuse blessing markets in South America and Africa.  But I've got lots of work to catch up on this week and would prefer to take time and do a good job with it.  The main point is that USA as a demand-market was supreme in 2001.  If we declared a company device to be a patent infringement, our courts could have played Kingmaker for either the Taipei or Tokyo-Seoul manufacturing bases above.  We still have control of the software, which is why "hardware is dead".  But Google free-basing (open sourcing for app developers) the OS may also have long term reprecussions.

At $45 per tablet, the share of the market which the USA represents is very small, it becomes less like the widescreen TV market and more like the cell phone market.  The stock market winners will probably be discount retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon.  But in my world view, the "winner" is also a small nation med school student who has in his hands something like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock held when I was in 1st grade, something which she/he can tweet the location of an ignorant backwards fundamentalist with weapons in Libya.  The "flash mob" is showing its teeth at the USA embassies the way a wolf cub chews the paw of its mother.   The people who really have to fear flash mobs are not Americans with fortress embassies in faraway lands.  The dictators and peddlars of ignorance will see the wolf cubs grow, and howl at the moon of equality, and defend womens rights.  The green revolution started in Iran and was put down violently, in part because the internet communication was so new.  The charts above are putting tablets in the hands of educated people.

Ok, like I said I'm too busy to knit this together.   But display devices are the eyes and ears of democracy, and as they get smaller, the normal curve will get more perponderant, and the normal curve is doing well enough to have something at risk.  This is all a good thing, for the world, for at least the short-to-medium term.  The most important thing in our lives will be how China decides to manage against their own "flash mobs", because before even the Iranian green revolution, there was T-Square.

Breaking news - flash mob riot at Foxconn plant, reported by Engadget

For the rest of the Digitimes article, see below (received by email).   The article is hawking an industry report, available for a mere $24,000 Taiwanese, or $840 USA.

Tablet touch screen applications have seen the biggest growth in recent years and are bringing in more profit per panel due to their larger size compared with panels used in handsets. In 2012, the proportion of panel shipments used in tablets will be 8.4%. The biggest change in the tablet touch screen market will be Apple's 7.85-inch iPad, which uses double-layer ITO thin-film touch panels provided by Japan-based panel makers. Thus, Taiwan-based panel makers' global shipments for tablets will fall to 69% in fourth-quarter 2012 from 90.9% in first-quarter 2012.

In the second half of 2012, as Windows 8 is about to reach the market, Taiwan-based panel makers will proactively enter supply chains for PCs that use touch panels. Because Taiwan-based panel makers began cultivating OGS (one glass solution) panel technology relatively early, they will still see revenues from PC-use touch screens due to the panel area being larger in PCs compared with handsets, despite the penetration rate for projected-capacitive touch screen notebooks and all-in-one (AIO) PCs only reaching 1% in fourth-quarter 2012.

Price: NT$24,000 or approx. US$840. Purchase the report


Table of contents
Introduction
    Shipments
       Chart 1: Global touch panel shipments by application, 2010-2012 (k units)
       Chart 2: Orders for touch panels used in high-end and low-end smartphones have shifted away from Taiwan-based panel makers
Taiwan makers, 2H12 forecast
    Chart 3: Taiwan touch panel shipments, by application, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 4: Taiwan touch panel shipments, by technology, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 5: Taiwan touch panel shipments, by maker, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 6: Taiwan touch panel shipments for handset applications, by technology,1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 7: Taiwan touch panel shipments for tablet applications under 11-inches, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 8: Taiwan touch panel shipments for non-Apple tablets sized under 11-inches, by maker, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 9: Taiwan touch panel shipments for tablets sized under 11-inches, by technology, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 10: Taiwan touch panel shipments for non-Apple tablets sized under 11-inches, by technology, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 11: Taiwan touch panel shipments for PC application, by maker, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
China makers, 2H12 forecast
    Chart 12: China touch panel shipments, by application, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 13: China touch panel shipments, by technology, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 14: China touch panel shipments, by panel maker, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 15: China touch panel shipments for handset applications, by technology, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Chart 16: China touch panel shipments for tablet applications, by maker, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
Trends in the 2H12 touch screen market
    Shift for Taiwan makers
       Chart 17: Taiwan touch panel shipments for tablet applications, by technology, 1Q12-4Q12, (k units)
    Samsung AMOLED
       Chart 18: Samsung Super AMOLED panel supply chain
    iPhone suppliers
       Table 1: New iPhone's embedded touch panel suppliers
       Chart 19: New iPhone's embedded touch panel share, by supplier,
    Windows 8
       Chart 20: Large size touch panel shipments, by application and technology, 2H12 (k units)
    Projected capacitive touch panel shipments
       Chart 21: Taiwan projected capacitive touch panel shipments, 1Q12-4Q12 (by area )
       Chart 22: Global touch panel shipments, by manufacturing region, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Smartphones
       Chart 23: Global touch panel shipments for handset applications, by manufacturing region, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
       Chart 24: Global touch panel shipments, for handset applications, by technology, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Tablets
       Chart 25: Global touch panel shipments for tablet applications, by manufacturing region, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
       Chart 26: Global touch panel shipments, for tablet applications, by technology, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)
    Regional production
       Chart 27: Global touch panel shipments, by geographic region, 1Q12-4Q12 (k units)



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