China screen makers catch out leaders

Mainland flat-screen makers, once dismissed as second-class players in the global LCD market, are drawing envious looks from big names such as LG and Samsung.

While the Korean giants were busy developing next-generation organic light emitting diode (OLED) televisions, mainland companies have started selling ultra-high-definition (UHD) displays that are sharper than the standard LCD but cheaper than OLED.

Until last year, the UHD market had been almost non-existent, with just 33,000 sets sold in the 200 million-unit LCD TV market. Since then, shipments have soared around 20-fold, data from research firm IHS shows.

The risk for OLED is that UHD may become mainstream, with long-awaited cheaper OLEDs arriving too late to displace it, analysts say.

OLED's long-term potential is huge: ultra-high-resolution, screens thin enough that they could conceivably be curved or even rolled up, and so on.

But its slow introduction into the market and high prices have thrown open a window of opportunity for UHD makers, in this case mainland companies like BOE Technology and China Star Optoelectronics Technology, a unit of China's biggest TV maker TCL.

On the mainland, 55-inch UHD models sell for about US$1,800. By contrast, an OLED TV of similar dimensions sold by Samsung costs around US$10,000.