Toshiba Focuses on LCDs, Drops OLED Development

Apparently, Samsung's dominance over the OLED market may soon strengthen, now that Toshiba has reportedly decided to give up on this segment completely in order to more easily focus on liquid crystal displays.

OLED (organic light emitting diode) screens may not be especially widespread as large format screens, but they are quite often found in smartphones, such as Verizon's Droid incredible.

So far, Samsung has held a firm grasp over this market, even though it has had to deal with competition from the likes of Toshiba.

More recently, however, reports have emerged stating that the latter has decided to completely back out of the OLED business, or at least tone down its efforts in this field by a fair deal.

This is because LCDs seem to be the focus of a larger part of the display industry, especially now that energy-efficient LED backlights have become common.

One of the reasons behind this decision is, as some may be aware, the fact that liquid crystal display sales surged dramatically this past year.

Nevertheless, the main reason for the shift in business outlook was the more or less poor financial performance of the company.

After scrapping its OLED business, the employees previously working on it will transfer over to the LCD panel division.

As such, there is, at least, the good news that there won't be a huge wave of job cuts.

According to the report, the display maker will continue to perform OLED-related research and development only for lighting equipment.

This, of course, is a big jump done from the original plan that Toshiba had in place for smartphone OLED panels.

To be more specific, the company was set on delivering about 1.5 million OLED smartphone panels each year. What the outfit plans to do in this area from now on remains to be seen.