Samsung Leads Touch-Panel Market
By Kim Yoo-chul
Staff Reporter
Riding on the global boon for electronics gadgets equipped with touch-screen panels, South Korean electronics giants Samsung and LG Electronics, are expected to benefit from the trend.
Today's cell-phones play music and movies, offer Internet and e-mail services and can even count the number of steps their user’s walk and many of them are easier to use especially those with touch panels.
Statistics compiled by DisplaySearch, a market research firm, forecast that the global touch-panel market sales will increase $1.8 billion this year from $1.2 billion in 2007.
Analysts say this indicated that cell-phone touch-panels will be the major growth tool in the global market and capacity-type technology will become the mainstream in mobile-telecom panel applications.
The advanced features on touch-panels include functionality where users mimic pinching and squeezing motions on screens to perform tasks, and allow screens to act as scanners when papers like business cards are laid on them.
In line with such brighter expectations, sources say that several positive factors ahead are expected to improve the operations of touch-panel makers, including the recovering cell-phone market in China _ the upcoming TD-SCDMA (time division-synchronous code division multiple access) operation and the high season in the consumer electronics market.
Many Chinese and Japanese cell-phone makers are expected to place new orders from the third quarter after actively cleaning their inventories in the second half.
"We are in talks with several electronics manufacturers to sell more of our touch-panels for digital cameras, personal navigation devices, as well as cell-phones," a Samsung Electronics spokesman said, Tuesday.
"We are sure to take more profits thanks to increasing shipments to Apple, Motorola, High Tech Computer and some portable PND makers."
Samsung has already shipped 4.3-inch touch-panels from January this year.
Japan's Sharp was known to delay the shipments of its new type of touch-screen liquid crystal display (LCD) panel for some technology reasons, while LG Display and Taiwan's AUO are set to deliver their touch-panels from the latter half, according to officials.
The rapid growth of the touch-screen market won't lose the current momentum over the next few years as touch-screens for in-car navigation systems and several other embedded applications will also increase.
"A rising demand for touch-screen phones will lead the market, but the strongest growth will also be in PCs, with the number of touch-screen equipped units shipped expected to more than quadruple by 2009," Nomura Securities wrote in a note for clients.
Touch-screens are standard on handheld tablet PCs and Ultra Mobile PCs, and are also used in many embedded and industrial computers. Citing those factors, industry experts say the trend is paving the way for more touch-screen media players and other gadgets.
"An additional factor likely to drive market growth is the success of touch screens on portable games consoles such as Nintendo DS," according to the Samsung spokesman.