BOE is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of LCDs, OLEDs, and flexible displays. Over the years, the company has been working to increase its shipments to Apple for the iPhones.
BOE gets its display driver ICs for Apple’s iPhone display panels from LG Semicon, but due to lack of production capacity from foundries owing to the global chip shortage, LG Semicon is apparently supplying display driver ICs to LG Display before BOE. As a result, BOE is expected to drop its OLED panel production volume from three million units to two million units, as of next month.
Apple has reportedly ordered up to 10 million OLED panel units from BOE for the first half of 2022, and it is unclear, as of yet, whether the shortage will impact ‌iPhone‌ supplies for the quarter, however, given that Apple doesn’t depend on one supplier, this seems to be quite unlikely.
However, BOE is scaling up its production for flexible smartphone OLED panels and is converting three of its existing production facilities into OLED suppliers for Apple. With this move, the company is likely to overtake LG Display by 2023 and become the second-biggest supplier in the list of companies providing OLED panels for iPhones.
Additionally, the company will also be supplying Apple with OLED LTPO displays for the higher-end models of the iPhone 15 lineup next year.
