Although it won’t be visibly evident or make a lot of difference, DigiTimes has reported that Apple has dropped the LG Display (LGD) as its official display panel provider. Until now, LGD was the biggest supplier of displays for iPad 2.
While this is not great news for LG, it certainly is good news for Chimei Innolux and Samsung, the two companies selected as LGD’s replacement. Samsung, which normally supplies around one million displays every month, doubled its July production volume. Though Samsung stands to gain a lot from the arrangement, the real winner in the whole episode is Chimei Innolux, which is now well equipped to leverage its association with Foxconn (the iPad manufacturers) to further increase its share in the iPad display demand volume.
We all know how Apple struggled to meet the phenomenal iPad 2 demand at the time of its launch. This led to lower than expected sales in the first quarter post its launch. However, Apple got its house in order soon and shipped more than nine million units of iPad 2s to the market in the last quarter. In fact, last week, the company went to the extent of dropping its shipping estimate of the gadget to ‘within 24 hours.’ Hence, this is the best time to buy an iPad 2. The shortage and shipping time issues are a thing of the past now.
The iPad 2 has been earning praises from happy customers all over the world and is the best tablet in the market today. While other companies such as Sony are busy trying to come up with a potential competitor of iPad, the market is yet to witness one.
