Taiwan's large-size panel shipments (excluding Sharp's) are expected to decline 4.1% sequentially but up 16.1% on year in the fourth quarter of 2020, after growing 11.2% on quarter and 20.7% on year to 71.58 million units a quarter earlier, Digitimes Research figures show.
The sequential declines of large-size panel shipments (9-inch and above) in the fourth quarter are likely to result from the short supplies of display driver ICs and power management (PWM) ICs.
Digitimes Research expects fourth-quarter panel shipments for tablet and TV applications to stay in high gear. The growth of tablet panels shipped to non-iPad suppliers will be higher than that to Apple in the quarter - a peak season for sales of white-box tablets that will benefit Taiwan's panel makers who are not among the suppliers in the iPad supply chain.
Given that TV panel prices already increased 30% in the third quarter and are likely to continue rising in the fourth quarter, Taiwan's panel makers are also likely to relocate more of their capacity previously designated for production of monitor panels to TV applications in order to help them ramp up revenues and profits.
Nevertheless, shipments of notebook and monitor panels will remain the mainstream accounting for nearly 60% of total large-size panel shipments in the fourth quarter, up 2.4pp from a year earlier.