A 60-Year History of Displays

A display is just a component. Yet this single part has repeatedly reshaped the industrial map of entire nations. The reason lies in how it is made.

Screens are built to standard specifications. A panel from Company A and a panel from Company B plug into the exact same slot and receive signals in the exact same way. That way, laptop and TV makers can pick and choose their parts. It is a convenient rule for buyers, but a brutal one for makers. It means there is almost no room to stand out through design. How do you win, then? The only thing left is production cost.

Production cost is determined by a single sheet of glass. Displays are made by patterning several screens onto a large glass substrate and cutting them out. It works on the same principle as producing chips from a round silicon wafer, except here the base plate is a rectangle of glass. As the glass gets bigger, wasted scrap decreases and the cost per screen drops. That is why the industry measures these glass sheets in 'generations' and has steadily pushed those generations higher. It is an industry where economies of scale directly decide who wins.

The catch is that upgrading generations requires building an entirely new factory. A single line costs billions of dollars and takes at least 2 years to build. You have to make that decision long before the products ever sell.

This creates a rhythm unique to this industry. When prices fall, new demand rushes in and screens run short. Faced with shortages, everyone builds more lines. Once those lines all begin operating at the same time, an oversupply floods the market and prices crash. When prices crash, everyone freezes investment together, only for shortages to return a few years later. Because this pattern mirrors the semiconductor industry's Silicon Cycle, it is called the Crystal Cycle.

In this market, then, 'when to invest' decides the game just as much as technology does. Throughout the story that follows, market leadership changes hands multiple times—and this rule stands behind every single shift.

In 1897, Karl Ferdinand Braun, a physicist at the University of Strasbourg, built a glass tube. When air was pumped out of the tube and electrons were fired from one end, a phosphor screen on the other end glowed. By rapidly steering the direction of the electrons to scan across, their trails formed a picture.

Braun was not trying to make a television. It was a measuring device meant to see invisible, high-frequency alternating current with the naked eye. Yet this tube later became every screen in the world. And it took his name, becoming known as the Braun tube.

There was one unavoidable flaw in the CRT. It needed distance for the electrons to travel. As the screen grew larger, the tube became that much deeper and heavier. The limitation of the CRT was not image quality, but volume and weight.

In 1964, George Heilmeier at RCA Laboratories in the United States discovered a strange property in a substance called liquid crystal. It flowed like a liquid, yet its molecules were aligned in one direction like a crystal; applying an electric current disrupted that alignment, scattering light. Since it did not emit light on its own, it consumed almost no power. He believed a wall-mounted color television would arrive soon.

On May 28, 1968, RCA held a press conference at its New York headquarters and unveiled that screen. It was the day a thin, light display that barely consumed electricity first appeared in the world.

And 2 years later, RCA abandoned the commercialization of this technology. The reason was not a lack of ability. At that time, RCA was selling CRTs on a massive scale. Top management viewed liquid crystals as a threat to their own business. Heilmeier later recalled that the people in charge of commercialization saw liquid crystals as a side distraction from their main business. He left the company in 1970 and never returned.

Many ideas for liquid crystal displays came out of that laboratory. Yet the company never made products with them.

There was one more problem left to solve before liquid crystals could be turned into products. The early method required high voltage, making it difficult to run on batteries.

The answer came almost simultaneously from Europe and the United States. It worked by placing liquid crystal molecules between two glass plates with a 90-degree twist, then applying electricity to unwind and rewind that twist, blocking or transmitting light. This is called twisted nematic, or TN mode for short. A patent was filed in Switzerland on December 4, 1970, while in the United States, another researcher achieved the same effect around the same time, leading to a later patent dispute. Even today, credit is not settled on a single person. What was clear was that this method operated at a much lower voltage.

The first company to turn this into a physical product was Japan's Sharp. On May 15, 1973, it released the EL-805 calculator, the first commercial product to use an LCD. At 2.1 cm thick, it was 1/12 the thickness of calculators at the time, and at 200 g, 1/125 the weight. Power consumption was 1/9,000, so it could run for 100 hours on a single AA battery. For the very first time, a calculator could fit into a shirt pocket.

In the watch business, Seiko did the same thing. For an item worn on the wrist, the less electricity it uses, the better, making it a natural match for liquid crystals.

Here, the story from the previous chapter returns. Sharp and Seiko had no CRT business. To companies selling CRTs, liquid crystals were something that would eat away at their own sales, but to these companies, they were simply a fresh opportunity. With nothing to lose, there was no reason to hesitate.

Sharp had one more condition in its favor. It had both the division that made liquid crystals and the division that used them. So whenever the technology advanced by one step, it could find a product inside the company suited to that stage. After calculators came watches, and after watches, small color screens. There was always a reason inside the company to justify the investment.

That is why throughout the 1970s and 1980s, liquid crystals remained 'screens attached to small gadgets' for a long time. Televisions were still the domain of the CRT.

There was a technological wall standing between small screens and large screens.

A screen is made up of countless dots. Each dot is a pixel, and how many pixels line up horizontally and vertically determines resolution. The problem was how to turn these dots on and off individually. When you send electric current across an entire line, neighboring dots faintly react, causing the image to blur and smudge as the screen gets larger.

The solution was attaching a tiny switch to every single dot. Creating that switch as a thin film on glass gave rise to the thin-film transistor, or TFT. Because each dot has its own dedicated switch, that single point can be turned on and off with precision. For liquid crystals to graduate from calculator displays to television screens, this architecture had to exist.

On June 24, 1988, Sharp announced a 14-inch full-color motion-video TFT-LCD. At 27 mm thick, it was about 1/13th the thickness of a CRT of the same screen size, and at 1.8 kg, it was about 1/4th the weight. At the time, the liquid crystal screens actually being mass-produced were only 3 inches.

How this panel was made is a fascinating story. The team was given a strict condition: use the existing equipment for 3-inch panels without buying new machinery. So, they used the stepper designed for 3 inches to expose the large panel in nine separate sections. Because longer wiring increased the risk of breaks, they split each dot into four identical pieces and fed signals from both ends, ensuring the display would survive even if one connection severed. Sneaking a panel through whenever the production line had downtime, the process took half a year from start to finish, and only four panels came out intact.

The true impact of the announcement lay less in the technology itself than in the signal it sent: a signal that liquid crystal had become a candidate for television. Major corporations that had only been conducting research until then—including Toshiba, IBM, and NEC—jumped into the liquid crystal industry right after this unveiling.

Here, the dynamic from the previous chapter plays out once more. It was precisely at this point that companies with CRT businesses entered the liquid crystal industry. It was not that they were unaware of liquid crystals. As long as their existing factories were still running profitably, they simply had no reason to move.

In the early 1990s, liquid crystal display panels were essentially a Japanese domain. It was not just the panels—the materials, components, and equipment were all contained within a single country.

When Korean companies tried to break in, there was nowhere to turn for technology. The story goes that they started by buying Japanese products and taking them apart. What gave them a boost was semiconductors. Since manufacturing LCD panels overlapped heavily with semiconductor processes, they could directly transfer the experience they had built up there. A prototype came out in October 1994, LG invested $400 million in August 1995 to build a line at its Gumi plant, and the following year Hyundai Electronics set up a line in Incheon.

The real showdown came next. Between 1995 and '96, when the market slumped and everyone else was cutting investment, Korean companies poured money into next-generation production lines. You build when prices fall, production shrinks, and others retreat. Since a line takes several years to build, if you break ground during a downturn, you are already rolling out products when the next boom arrives. If you got it right, the tables would turn; if you got it wrong, the entire company would shake to its foundations.

There were reasons why the incumbents were pushed aside, too. Japanese companies were moving up glass substrate generations one careful step at a time: for 10.1-inch, then 11.3-inch, then 12.1-inch panels. It was a rational way to spread risk. But the market skipped the intermediate step, jumping straight from 10.1 inches to 12.1 inches. The money invested in that middle step could never be recouped.

The second reason was accounting. The investment scale of Japanese firms was structured around how much profit they had made the previous year. Yet between 1998 and 2002, the operating profits of Japanese LCD makers were negative, while Korean makers remained in the black over the same period. For several years in a row, they simply could not invest even if they wanted to. It was decided not by technology, but by the balance sheet.

Korea is recorded to have overtaken Japan in global market share for large LCD panels in 2001. That was just six or seven years after Korean companies entered the market. Then, when the dot-com bubble burst and the market slumped once more, Korean companies made the same gamble in 2002 and 2003. When laptop demand surged in the second half of 2003, that bet paid off.

However, the rankings varied depending on the metric. In 2005, Taiwan rose to number one in terms of unit production volume. In terms of revenue, Korea stayed ahead. The panels Korean companies produced were larger, meaning each sheet commanded a higher price. It was a year when the leader in volume and the leader in revenue were two different countries.

Here is a part that often gets skipped. It might look like the transition went straight from CRTs to liquid crystals, but there were several other paths along the way.

First was plasma. You pack tiny cells tightly between two sheets of glass, fill them with gas, and apply electricity, creating plasma inside those chambers. The ultraviolet light produced there strikes phosphors to emit visible light. Because each dot emits its own light, building large screens was easier than with liquid crystals.

And that was indeed the case. Fujitsu released a commercial 21-inch color plasma panel in October 1992, and announced a 42-inch model on August 24, 1995. It featured an 852×480 resolution, a thickness of 75mm, and a weight of 18kg. The sample price was 1 million yen, with a mass-production target price of 500,000 yen. On November 28, 1996, it began mass production of 42-inch panels for the first time in the world. It designed the Miyazaki plant for a scale of 10,000 units per month. It was plasma, not liquid crystal, that first turned the 'large wall-mounted screen'—something impossible with CRTs—into reality.

Yet plasma had a structural weakness. Because each tiny cell had to be fabricated individually, the unit economics didn't make sense as screens got smaller. It simply couldn't move into laptops or monitors. Liquid crystal, on the other hand, grew its footprint step by step—from laptops to monitors, and from monitors to TVs—advancing glass substrate generations each time. In that process, costs kept dropping, and it eventually caught up with plasma even on large screens. Panasonic ended plasma production in December 2013.

Another contender was SED. A CRT becomes deep because it relies on a single electron gun, but if you make those guns microscopic and place one under every single dot, you get CRT-level image quality on a thin panel. Canon started in the 1980s, and Toshiba joined later. It was praised for brightness close to a CRT and zero motion blur on fast-moving screens. Sony pushed FED, which worked on a similar principle.

However, they couldn't bring manufacturing costs down to the levels of liquid crystal and plasma. On top of that came patent litigation, compounded by the financial crisis. Toshiba pulled out first, and Canon shut the business down in 2010.

Where these three technologies diverged was not picture quality, but cost. And cost came down to glass substrate size and line scale. It was the exact same rule we saw in the previous chapter.

It took quite some time for the CRT to be pushed aside. By revenue, LCD TVs surpassed CRT TVs in the fourth quarter of 2005, but in terms of unit volume, CRTs were still selling more. It was not until the fourth quarter of 2007 that unit sales finally flipped. According to DisplaySearch figures, LCD TVs accounted for 47% of total sales volume, while CRTs made up 46%. It was 110 years after the birth of the CRT.

What followed happened fast. According to Samsung SDI’s sustainability report citing data from the Samsung Economic Research Institute, CRT TV sales volume dropped from 53 million units in 2009 to 43 million units in 2010, and was projected to slide to around 28 million units in 2011. A technology that had held its ground for over a decade vanished in just a few years.

Meanwhile, a new contender had entered the field. China’s BOE stepped into large-size LCDs in 2003 by acquiring the LCD business of Korea’s Hydis. Then, in March 2018, its Gen 10.5 line in Hefei entered mass production. Because it used the world’s largest glass substrates, it could cut large TV panels like 65-inch and 75-inch screens with virtually no wasted margins. True to the rules of this industry, as the glass got bigger, the cost per sheet dropped.

The scale of capital expenditure was on another level as well. In its 2023 public disclosure, BOE revealed that it received about $536 million in government subsidies that year alone. Although this is a figure from a single company for one year, it shows the sheer scale at which investments in this industry operate.

Next came a game of chicken. Even when demand slumped, nobody cut production; instead, they ramped it up, waiting to see which higher-cost competitor would throw in the towel first. In May 2022, LCD TV panel prices for 55 inches and under fell below cash cost. That meant every panel produced drained cash. In early June of that year, 32-inch and 43-inch panels dropped another $5 to $6 in a single week, 55-inch fell by $7, and 65-inch and 75-inch plunged by $12 to $14 each.

The outcome followed the exact pattern seen in the previous chapter. Samsung Display ended production of LCD panels for TVs in June 2022, marking an exit after 30 years. In September 2024, LG Display agreed to sell its Guangzhou plant to China’s TCL CSOT for 2.03 trillion won, a deal finalized early the following year.

The numbers tell the story. According to CINNO Research figures, global display panel revenue in the first half of 2025 was $56.2 billion, with country shares by revenue standing at 52.1% for China, 13.2% for Taiwan, and 3.5% for Japan. It was the first half-year in which China captured more than half the market. Based on revenue figures analyzed by the Korea Display Industry Association from Omdia data for that same year, Korea’s LCD market share fell to 7.9%, down further from 10.2% the previous year.

In a market structure defined by monopoly and oligopoly, where a handful of companies share the pie, a single line from one player can immediately upend the rankings. The very rule that had worked when Korea overtook Japan had now turned around and pointed straight at Korea.

In 1987, two researchers at Kodak in the United States published a paper on a light-emitting device made by stacking two layers of organic materials. It was the first paper to demonstrate a structure that actually emitted light at low voltage. This was the starting point of OLED, and just like liquid crystal, it originated in the lab of an American company.

Let us first look at what changes. Liquid crystals cannot emit light on their own. That is why they keep a light turned on behind them, blocking and letting that light pass through. Even when creating a black screen, the backlight behind it stays lit, so it never turns completely dark, and you also get light bleed where light leaks out around the edges of the screen. With OLED, organic materials at each subpixel emit light directly, so a turned-off pixel is simply off. There is no need to lay down a backlight, allowing the screen to become thinner, and black becomes truly black.

There are bonus perks as well. Because pixels that are off consume no electricity, an AOD feature that continuously displays only the clock or notifications becomes possible. Instead, it comes with issues such as OLED burn-in, where parts left on for a long time leave a lasting mark. Whichever method you choose, gaining something always means giving something up.

The sequence that followed feels familiar. The first commercial product came from Japan. In 1997, Pioneer is known to have incorporated OLED into a display for car audio. It came 10 years after the research paper.

South Korea took mass production. Samsung SDI notes in its corporate history that it began the world's first mass production of AMOLED in September 2007. It was an era when smartphones were just beginning to spread, and a thin screen that saved power was precisely what the device needed.

TVs took longer. On January 2, 2013, LG Electronics announced domestic pre-orders for a 55-inch OLED TV. The price was 11 million won, the panel thickness was 4mm, and it weighed under 10kg. It was a method that added a white subpixel on top of red, green, and blue.

The United States invented it, Japan made the first product, and South Korea took mass production. The sequence seen with liquid crystal had repeated itself, exactly as before, 40 years later.

How do things stand today? Based on revenue analyzed by the Korea Display Industry Association from Omdia data, the 2025 OLED market share was 68.7% for South Korea and 31.2% for China. It was also the first year that South Korea's market share rose after steadily falling ever since China entered this market. Narrowing the market reveals an even wider gap. According to UBI Research, South Korea's share in large OLEDs of 9 inches or more was 92.4%, and within that for TVs, LG Display held 81% and Samsung Display held 19%.

However, the same data also notes that the combined OLED market share of Chinese companies came close to 50%. These are numbers that read completely opposite depending on which market and which metric you look at.

There is no need to try to predict the future. Instead, guided by the rules this story has revealed, let’s summarize what signals to watch so you can be the first to notice when the board begins to shift.

First, it is the moment the glass sheets get bigger. The points where rankings shifted in this industry were almost always generational transitions. Korea overtaking Japan and China rewriting the cost structure of large TV panels both happened on new-generation lines. Right now, all eyes are on the IT OLED lines destined for laptops and tablets. You just need to watch which country stabilizes and operates the next-generation line first.

Second, it is how you read the numbers. Even the market share figures mentioned in this chapter were measured under very different criteria. In the same year, "Korea OLED 68.7%," "Korea large-size OLED 92.4%," and "China 52.1%" were all true statements. The first two covered different segments of the market, while the third was not OLED at all, but the total display market measured on a half-year basis. There were also years when the leader in unit shipments and the leader in revenue were different countries. Any ranking article that omits which organization released the figure, when, and by what criteria is, by that alone, already half wrong.

Third, it is the timing and scale of China's investments. The side that took the board was always the one that lowered unit costs first with larger glass sheets. Korea made those decisions right when prices hit rock bottom. That is why which line breaks ground today and when will reveal the rankings a few years down the road. Forecasts are already out. Omdia projects 2030 OLED market share at 42% for China and 58% for Korea, while UBI Research expects China to overtake Korea in 2029. Both are projections, not settled facts. Over the past 60 years, forecasts have come true exactly as predicted, and they have also missed the mark completely.

Fourth, it is the next downturn. The Crystal Cycle has never disappeared. Who holds onto their lines on the day prices collapse—that is where the next master of the industry has always been decided.

Finally, just one more thing. Most of those pushed aside in this story were not pushed out because they lacked manufacturing skill. RCA was the company that first revealed liquid crystal displays to the world, Sharp was the company that built a 14-inch panel when everyone else could only manage 3 inches, and Fujitsu was the company that first turned large wall-hanging screens into reality. Each made rational decisions from where they stood at the time, and those very decisions simply turned into burdens in the next round.

No one knows yet whose turn will come next. But if you have read this far, you can probably guess where that spot will be.