14 DAY TRIAL // The LCD business is an extremely lucrative one nowadays, since the worldwide demand for liquid crystal display panels has seriously soared over the course of 2007. However, it seems that Samsung's market dominance is very hard to beat, and this is the reason why two of the Korean company's closest competitors, namely Sharp and Toshiba, have decided to enter a strategic partnership that will perhaps help them to topple someday the undisputed market king.
Thus, according to the companies' joint statement, they will be entering the aforementioned partnership in 2008, starting with an expansion of reciprocal procurement - Sharp's procurement of system LSIs (acronym for Large-Scale Integration, they are integrated circuits with tens of thousands of transistors per chip) for LCDs from Toshiba, and Toshiba's procurement of Sharp's LCD modules for TVs of 32 inches and larger. Through the program, Sharp aims to satisfy about 50 percent of its total demand for system LSIs for TVs in fiscal year 2010, while Toshiba targets meeting 40 percent of its demand for LCD modules in the same year.
System LSIs for TVs are increasingly required to support advanced functions and higher levels of performance alongside their core role of image processing. As TVs shift to higher levels of resolution, Toshiba's system LSIs for TVs deliver the company's image processing know-how in products that meet the most demanding requirements of major TV set manufacturers.
By bringing together their technologies, Sharp and Toshiba hope to promote business advances through development of differentiated products. Each company aims to secure a leading position in the LCD TV market, and to reinforce its capabilities in LCDs and semiconductors, by overcoming increasingly intense global competition (that from TPV, Philips and Samsung, to be more precise).
Will this deal affect in any way the Korean and Taiwanese companies' rule over the LCD market? Will the Japanese get back to the front of the LCD panel manufacturers' pack? Well, only time will tell, but from this point of view (among many others), 2008 promises to be a very interesting year.
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