Taiwan's Display Panel Industry Rallies on Recovering Market

Taipei, Jun. 12, 2012 (CENS)--With the global market for display panels slowly recovering, Taiwanese makers of such products and related parts are gradually recovering from severe downturns in the past months.

DisplaySearch, a global display market researcher, issued its latest report indicating that global shipments of display panels have slowly increased in April and May, during which quotations remained almost unchanged. This seemingly robust uptrend is helping Taiwanese makers to improve operating performance.

For example, AU Optronics Corp. (AUO), the second-largest maker of this kind on the island by revenue, posted combined revenue of NT$31.402 billion in May, slightly up 3.4% from a month ago, or down 6.6% from a year earlier. The company's shipment of large-sized display panels totaled about 10.22 million units, rising 1.9% month-on-month.

Worth mentioning is that this maker, which has begun mass production of new small and medium-sized display panels recently, including 10.1-inch models for Asus's latest Transformer tablet model and AMOLED (active matrix organic light emitting diode) models, saw its shipment of such products increased 17.1% monthly to 12.78 million units in May.

Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd. effectively improved its combined revenue to NT$3.654 billion in May, down 4% from April or 32.1% from last May, with shipment of small and medium-sized panels reaching 42.66 million units, only 3.5% less than April's, compared to that of large-sized models sharply decreasing 43.2% to 213,000 units.

Benefiting partly from downstream display panel makers, the light guide plate supplier, Global Lighting Technologies Inc., scored sales revenue of NT$370 million in May, sharply up 36.08% from a year ago or 3.8% from April.

This supplier emphasized that the banner May revenue growth also resulted from the booms following China's newest economic stimulus packages, especially subsidies provided on consumers' purchases of energy-saving white goods, such as LED-backlit LCD TVs.