Made in China is about to end another high-tech industry in South Korea, showing its competitive advantage

The competition between Chinese manufacturing and Korean manufacturing in high-tech industries is becoming increasingly fierce. One of the typical examples is the panel industry. Chinese panel is overtaking South Korea in advanced technology and will overtake South Korea in advanced technology, giving a heavy blow to South Korean manufacturing.

In the TV industry, Chinese panel challenged the OLED panel technology of South Korea with miniLED technology, and has made gratily progress, bringing huge pressure to the Korean counterparts in the high-end TV market.

The data of 2022 showed that the shipment of OLED TVS dominated by South Korea almost did not increase, and the shipment of OLED TVS was about 7.4 million units. The miniLED TVS strongly promoted by Chinese TV enterprises maintained a rapid growth, and the shipment of miniLED TVS reached more than 3 million units in 2022.

OLED TV panel supplier is mainly South Korea's LGD, LGD has been promoting OLED TV for many years, but OLED TV has always been a burning screen problem, resulting in OLED TV scale has been difficult to expand, which also hinder the development of LGD; In order to solve the screen burning problem of OLED TV, Samsung proposed the QD-OLED panel technology. However, the mass production of Samsung's QD-OLED panel has been delayed, because Samsung could not determine whether QD-OLED could resist the miniLED technology promoted by Chinese TV enterprises.

TCL is the leader in promoting miniLED TV in China. In fact, TCL also produces OLED panels, but the OLED panels produced by TCL are mainly targeted at mobile phone industry, and the TV industry will vigorously promote miniLED. TCL, the world's third largest TV maker, is closing the gap with LG in terms of sales, which means that TCL is putting enormous pressure on Korean companies in terms of both technology and sales.

In the domestic market, miniLED TV outpaced OLED TV. In 2022, the shipment of miniLED TV in China market has reached 395,000 units, an increase of nearly four times year-on-year. OLED TV shipments fell nearly 30% to 206,000 units, lagging far behind the miniLED.

miniLED technology is actually a transitional technology, and the advanced panel technology that is considered to replace OLED technology is microLED. However, the technical difficulty of microLED is too great and the cost is too high, so Chinese panel enterprises choose to promote miniLED, which has much lower technical difficulty. The miniLED is quite suitable for TV with large screen, with high contrast and gorgeous colors.

In the past decade or more, South Korean TV companies Samsung and LG have dominated the high-end TV market because of their advantages in TV technology, while Chinese TV companies can only struggle in the middle and low-end TV market, which also leads to the very low profit of Chinese TV companies. The net profit of Chinese TV companies has always fluctuated around 1.5%.

However, China's panel industry successfully beat South Korea in the LCD panel market, resulting in Samsung and LGD withdrawing from the LCD panel market successively, which greatly increased the confidence of China's panel industry. Therefore, China's panel industry began to layout in advanced miniLED panel technology, hoping to overtake South Korea with miniLED panel technology. With the rapid growth of miniLED TV sales sold by Chinese TV enterprises, it is highly possible for miniLED technology to replace OLED technology, so that China will achieve the goal of overtaking in corners.

In addition to the panel industry, China is also challenging South Korea in the memory chip industry recently. Chinese memory chips have seized the market with a fierce price war, resulting in high inventory of Samsung's memory chips. South Korea's competitive advantage in the high-tech industry is continuing to weaken, and we hope that Chinese manufacturing will gain an advantage in more high-tech industries.