Foxconn-Sharp considering LCD plant in US

Nikkei Asia Review ^ | January 13, 2017 | Jun Iiyama, Nikkei staff writer

[Kellis91789]

Why LCD ? Any new factory should be OLED.

[dp0622]

I was born in ‘68 and I guess it wasn’t that big by my 20s.

My nephew, who is 20, TRIED IT!!! He told me he was terrified the whole time. Glasses or dishes walking and talking :)

He said it made him terrified of drugs. Good!!

But I still should have smacked him.

I’ve gotta run now, a dish is calling me from the kitchen...

[cableguymn]

Close!
Dufus is his name.

[CurlyDave]

How is it winning? or America First to have foreign companies “create” jobs for Americans?

Something not right/good about this.

Here are some of the ways it is winning:

1. Jobs in the US, for Americans. Or would you rather have the jobs in China and we import the stuff?

2. The physical plant is in the US. And the expertise to run it is here. If there is a war, it stays right here.

3. Even though the profits might go overseas, our other option is to have the profits and the wages be overseas.

4. Wealthy, powerful people in China having a large investment in the US is vastly to the benefit of both sides. It gives both sides an incentive to resolve differences peacefully and keep those investments.

[mazda77]

I wondered when somebody was going to state the obvious. LCD is so passe’ LED is the only pathway to the future at this point. LCD’s degenerate at a far greater rate than do LED.

[moonhawk]

Born in ‘68? I’d tried it many times by then. It was fun at the time. Not my best moves, by far, but I got over all that a very long time ago.

[Kellis91789]

Well, saying “LED” is not really correct. An “LED” TV is just an LCD TV that has replaced a traditional lamp with an LED light source for backlighting the entire panel through the Liquid Crystals that allow light to shine through the pixels.

“OLED”, on the other hand is an entirely different technology that doesn’t use Liquid Crystals at all. It is much more like Plasma except instead of phosphors being lit up it is Organic Light Emitting Diode material of each RGB base color being excited at each pixel to create the end color and brightness needed. Unlike LCD panels, OLED does not even require a “clean room” factory, and the OLED materials can be printed on substrates other than glass. This should make OLED panels much less expensive to produce than LCDs. If it weren’t for amortizing the R&D of OLED into the products, the profit margins would be sky high compared to LCD.

I worked for a Japanese electronics maker who purchased a factory in NC. They brought in a lot of “new” equipment that turned out to be their old previously used equipment from a Tokyo factory. That allowed them to continue producing their old designs here while Tokyo moved on to producing their new designs. I wonder if that is what Foxconn-Sharp is doing here — the factory cost will be low because they will install the old machinery for producing LCDs as they move on to producing OLEDs in Japan and China. Producing low-profit items here and high-profit items at home is SOP at Japanese manufacturers because it keeps the higher taxes feeding the home government.