Anyone who’s had dealings with LG and Samsung will know that the two Korean brands aren’t exactly the best of friends. The rivalry between them is legendarily intense - especially when it comes to the television market, as became clearer than ever at the recent CES in Las Vegas.
It comes as a major surprise, therefore, to hear today via Bloomberg that Samsung has apparently signed up to buy LCD TV panels from its arch rival.
According to ‘people with direct knowledge of the matter’, Samsung was driven into the arms of LG Display Co. when its preferred supplier of some of its LCD TV panels, Sakai Display Products (a joint venture between Foxconn and Sharp Corp), decided to drastically cut back on its supply of the relatively large LCD screens required for TVs.
Sakai has previously supplied an estimated 4 million large LCD panels a year to Samsung for use in TVs, so you can instantly see the extent of the hole that Samsung’s TV division would have been faced with by Sakai’s decision to ramp back large LCD panel supplies.
It’s not clear at this stage which part of Samsung’s TV range is going to be served by the LG Display deal - though given Samsung’s development of QLED technology for its high-end TVs this year (see this previous story), I suspect that the LG panels will be going into relatively low end Samsung TVs. It’s not even clear if the panels will be Ultra HD or just HD.