The price increase expectations that have circulated in the display panel industry for several months officially materialized in September.
From September 14 to 16, TCL CSOT, BOE, and HKC sequentially issued official price adjustment notices to their customers. TCL CSOT decided to raise the prices of certain display panel products, HKC increased prices for some LCD panels, and BOE planned to adjust its quotations starting in the fourth quarter. Global TV manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, and Sony are all within the scope of customers affected by this round of price adjustments.
If looking solely at costs, this is not difficult to understand. The reasons given by the three companies are roughly the same: the rising costs of upstream materials such as glass substrates, driver ICs, and PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) can no longer be fully absorbed by the panel manufacturers themselves. According to AVC statistics, in the first quarter of this year, PCB prices rose by about 5%, while chemicals and target materials increased by 5% to 10%, driving an overall quarter-on-quarter increase of approximately 2% in the BOM cost of panels. In the second and third quarters, PCBs and driver ICs still face price increase pressures.
However, what is more noteworthy is the timing of the price increases. AVC Revo forecasts that after the World Cup stocking ends, global TV shipments in the third quarter of 2026 will decrease by about 3% year-on-year. Despite weak demand, leading panel manufacturers have begun to pass costs down to the downstream, indicating that the industry's supply landscape is different from what it was a decade ago.
In the first half of 2026, BOE, TCL CSOT, and HKC held global market shares of 27%, 24.5%, and 15.8% in the LCD TV panel market, respectively, with the three combined accounting for over two-thirds; the overall share of mainland China panel manufacturers reached 72.4%. The confidence behind the price hikes stems from the fact that the LCD industry, which historically relied on capacity expansion and price wars to grab orders, is entering a phase of higher concentration and greater emphasis on capacity discipline.
The Qualification to Raise Prices Was Ceded by the Exits Following Samsung
The direct trigger for this round of price increases is cost, but the confidence to pass these costs on to customers comes from the continuous clearing of the supply side over the past few years.
Samsung Display ended its LCD panel production in 2022; Sharp's Sakai Display Products ceased large-sized LCD panel production in September 2024; and JDI's Tottori factory concluded LCD production in March 2025. Even earlier, Panasonic had already exited LCD panel production. On the other hand, LG Display did not simply shut down its 8.5-generation LCD line in Guangzhou but officially transferred it to TCL CSOT in April 2025.
The reasons for these exits are not entirely the same. Sharp and JDI represent capacity truly leaving the market; the LG Guangzhou factory merely changed owners, but there is one less independent pricing seller. The result in all cases is further concentration on the LCD supply side.
The contrast is most evident. Around 2011, Samsung and LG once accounted for about half of the global TV-sized LCD panel market share, making them the two most pricing-influential companies at the time. Fifteen years later, the positions have been taken by Chinese manufacturers. In the first half of 2026, the combined market share of just BOE, TCL CSOT, and HKC reached 67.3%.
This certainly does not imply that a high market share allows for unlimited price hikes. TV demand, capacity utilization rates, and inventory will still cause prices to fluctuate. However, the intense cycle of the past—"continuous commissioning of new production lines—oversupply—prices falling below cost—followed by further exits"—is being rewritten by higher concentration and a more cautious pace of capacity expansion. This round of price increases in September can be seen as the first time bargaining power is directly reflected in prices after the industry's consolidation.
However, the concentration of LCD market share only solves the question of "who is producing." A more significant change is occurring in the technology routes themselves: the competition for next-generation displays has already begun, and it is no longer a simple substitution race.
Next-Generation Displays: No Longer a Simple Substitution Race
When discussing the future of TVs a decade ago, the market easily formed a linear judgment: OLED would drive LCD out of the high-end market just as LCD eliminated CRT; and further down the line, Micro LED would take over.
LG at CES 2015
Today, this judgment has only been half realized.
The advantages of OLED are clear: pixel self-emission allows blacks to be turned off directly, offering superior contrast, response speed, and thinness compared to traditional LCDs. However, it has not achieved a crushing dominance across all dimensions. On large-sized display substrates, OLED still faces issues such as lifespan, burn-in, yield rate, and cost.
LCD has therefore left room for a counterattack. Mini LED has not abandoned LCD; instead, it divides the backlight into more zones for independent light control, compensating for the shortcomings in black levels, contrast, and brightness, essentially pushing mature LCDs further into the high-end market.
This improved route quickly developed into a market of scale. Counterpoint data shows that in the second quarter of 2024, Mini LED TV shipments and sales revenue in the high-end market surpassed OLED for the first time. TrendForce forecasts that global Mini LED TV shipments will reach 24.9 million units in 2026; Omdia estimates that OLED TV shipments during the same period will be about 6.9 million units.
More importantly, Mini LED naturally inherits the production lines, supply chains, and cost advantages formed during the LCD era. The large-sized LCD capacity heavily invested in by Chinese manufacturers over the past decade did not quickly become a sunk cost with the emergence of OLED; instead, it regained high-end space through Mini LED. In 2024, the combined market share of the three Chinese brands TCL, Hisense, and Xiaomi in the global Mini LED TV market reached 53%; by the first quarter of 2026, TCL once rose to first place with a 30.2% global share.
RGB Mini LED continues to advance, allowing the backlight itself to participate in color control. The increasingly segmented routes actually demonstrate that display performance is inherently a combination of multiple metrics such as brightness, lifespan, color, power consumption, and cost, and no single technology can win across all scenarios simultaneously.
Technological divergence has therefore become a protective umbrella for existing capacity. With each additional viable route, the possibility of the so-called "next-generation technology" clearing out the previous generation's capacity in one go becomes lower. The rules of the panel war have also shifted from "betting on the right route to consume the previous generation" to "competing for the most suitable ecological niche in different scenarios."
After Divergence, Every Route Needs Players
This change is particularly evident in OLED. OLED has not completely taken over TVs, but it is rapidly entering laptops and monitors.
Omdia forecasts that global large-sized OLED panel shipments will grow by 18.8% to 38.8 million units in 2026, with OLED laptop panel shipments increasing by 66% and OLED monitors by 34%. In the second quarter of this year, global OLED monitor shipments increased by 98% year-on-year. The next most fierce competition for OLED is highly likely to be at the desk rather than in the living room.
This is also why BOE, TCL CSOT, and Visionox are all investing in 8.6-generation OLED production lines. Using larger mother glass to cut 14-inch, 16-inch, and other IT products is essentially to improve efficiency and reduce unit area costs.
However, the three Chinese manufacturers have not bet on the same process.
BOE follows the mature FMM evaporation route. The Chengdu 8.6-generation AMOLED line, with a total investment of CNY 63 billion and a designed monthly capacity of 32,000 sheets, has already achieved mass production and shipments in June this year. The advantage lies in the mature process and clear customer validation path; the cost is the continued reliance on high-precision metal masks, evaporation equipment, and mature material systems.
TCL CSOT is betting on inkjet printing. Its 5.5-generation line has already achieved mass production for medical displays and is beginning to advance towards monitors and laptops; the 8.6-generation t8 line is expected to enter mass production in the fourth quarter of 2027. Its core bet is to improve material utilization, reduce reliance on FMM and some vacuum evaporation equipment, and redraw the OLED cost curve.
Visionox, on the other hand, is betting on ViP, using semiconductor photolithography concepts to directly define pixels and bypass FMM. It has already begun supplying Honor's wearable products, and the Hefei 8.6-generation line is also advancing equipment installation. It has the strongest differentiation but also the highest process risk.
These three routes look like "a hundred flowers blooming," but that does not mean everyone will win. FMM wins in maturity, while inkjet printing and ViP win in potential cost and process freedom; once the latter two achieve breakthroughs in yield, lifespan, and material systems, the old capacity in the same-sized OLED market may face more intense cost pressure. Divergence does not mean there are no winners or losers; it just means the win-or-lose metric has shifted from "whether one bet correctly on OLED" to "who can make their process cheaper and more stable."
Korean manufacturers have not left the field either. Samsung Display started its 8.6-generation OLED earlier and still holds advantages in high-end IT customers and mass production experience. Chinese manufacturers are more like executing "multi-route coverage": some are pursuing mature routes, some are betting on low-cost routes, and some are securing positions in advance with new manufacturing methods.
As for Micro LED, it is more like a distant battlefield. With single-pixel self-emission, high brightness, high efficiency, and long lifespan, its theoretical performance approaches the ideal state. However, a 4K screen requires handling over 20 million RGB sub-pixels, and mass transfer, inspection and repair, backplane yield, and cost remain major challenges. Omdia estimates that the global Micro LED display market size will only be about USD 105 million in 2026, with the current stage mainly focusing on high value-added scenarios such as ultra-large-sized commercial displays, home theaters, and micro-displays.
Beyond Market Share, Profits Remain Bottlenecked Upstream
What technological divergence truly changes is not just "who makes the next-generation display," but also where the profits ultimately remain.
Mainland China has already secured over 70% of the global LCD TV panel market share and entered the global first tier in Mini LED terminal brands; regarding OLED, 8.6-generation lines are beginning to enter a dense period of mass production and construction. At both the capacity and terminal levels, Chinese manufacturers have transitioned from followers to major players.
However, the further upstream, the more the competition persists.
Traditional FMM OLED requires high-precision evaporation equipment, fine metal masks, and high-performance light-emitting materials. 6-generation mass production evaporation equipment has long been concentrated in the hands of a few suppliers such as Canon Tokki, and 8.6-generation equipment is also mainly competed for by Japanese and South Korean companies; on the light-emitting materials front, companies like Universal Display still hold critical positions relying on materials, patents, and customer validation.
This also explains why inkjet printing and ViP are worth the higher process risks for panel manufacturers: what they primarily want to bypass are the limitations of FMM and some traditional evaporation equipment, allowing for the redesign of material utilization, size, and cost. But this does not mean material bottlenecks will automatically disappear. Whether it is evaporation, printing, or photolithography, it ultimately comes back to fundamental issues such as the lifespan, efficiency, purity, and mass production consistency of light-emitting materials.
Over the past decade, the most important task for China's display industry was to build high-generation production lines and turn panels, which were long dependent on imports, into the world's largest production base. Today, this battle has moved to the next layer.
The competition has shifted from "whether one can manufacture the screen" to "whether one can turn their route into a market of scale amid technological divergence"; taking it a step further, it is about whether one can hold the processes, materials, and equipment—links that cannot be bypassed in any route—together in their own hands.