LG Display's automotive OLED costs have been reduced by 50%

LG Display is targeting both the OLED and LCD car display markets. In particular, the company is actively working to significantly increase its sales share in the automotive OLED market through product development and cost efficiency improvements. In fact, the company is said to have reduced manufacturing costs by more than half in just seven years since it began mass production of automotive OLEDs.

Sun Ki-hwan, General Manager of Automotive Marketing and Product Planning at LG Display, introduced the automotive OLED market strategy at the "OLED & XR Korea 2025" event held at L Tower in Yangjae on the morning of April 18. Currently, LG Display is offering various customized product lines according to each demand source to conquer the automotive display market.

OLED products are divided into P-OLED, which combines a flexible plastic substrate with a tandem OLED, and ATO (Advanced Thin OLED), which reduces manufacturing costs by changing the plastic substrate of P-OLED to a glass substrate. For LCD, both LPTS and oxide technologies are being developed based on TFT (Thin Film Transistor) materials.

In particular, LG Display plans to actively expand the automotive OLED market in the future. Automotive OLED displays have excellent image quality and are bendable, so they can be applied to various curved surfaces of vehicles. As a result, they are being adopted by major customers such as GM, Volvo, Jaguar Land Rover and Porsche in their high-end products.

OLED accounted for an estimated 25% of LG Display’s total automotive display sales last year. The company aims to increase that to 40% by 2028 and 50% by 2030. To that end, LG Display is developing new products such as the 40-inch column-to-column (P2P) while reducing manufacturing costs to expand automotive OLEDs to low- and mid-priced cars as well as high-end vehicles. “When we first developed automotive OLED in the world, it was almost five times more expensive than LTPS LCD,” said Son Ki-hwan. “But now, manufacturing costs have fallen to less than twice that of LTPS LCD.”

LG Display began mass production of automotive OLED displays in 2019. This shows that LG Display has quickly established cost competitiveness within 7 years of entering the industry. Son Ki-hwan emphasized, "OLED displays were previously limited to high-end cars, but are now also being adopted by mid- and low-priced cars. In the future, we will maintain our leading position in the automotive display market by expanding the scale of OLED and LCD fields."