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The U.S. International Commission (ITC) announced on September 22 (local time) that it has accepted Suniva’s petition to seek relief against all solar imports under Section 201 of the 1974 Trade Act. Following the affirmation of Suniva’s claim, ITC will develop recommendations to safeguard the U.S. solar market against imports from Asia. EnergyTrend, TrendForce’s green energy research division, states that ITC’s ruling is expected to raise the solar trade barrier significantly and may slash the U.S. photovoltaic (PV) demand for the whole 2018 by half.
HTC announced on September 21 that the company’s R&D and engineering unit that is responsible for Google’s Pixel smartphones will be officially joining Google. This deal to acquire of HTC’s talents and assets related to smartphone manufacturing is worth a total of US$1.1 billion. Below is a brief analysis of this deal by TrendForce and a table showing this year’s quarterly production volumes of Google and HTC branded smartphones. Hopefully, our research will be useful to you as a reference should you decide to report on this event.
Toshiba announced on September 20 that the company has agreed to sell its memory business, Toshiba Memory Corporation (TMC) to a U.S.-Japanese consortium represented by U.S. private equity firm Bain Capita for JPY 2 trillion (USD 18 billion). According to DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, the deal will start to have a notable impact on the NAND Flash market in the first half of 2018 as the negotiations took longer than expected. From a medium- to long-term perspective, this deal will inject the necessary capital into TMC so that it can work to become a rival to Samsung in terms of NAND Flash technology and production capacity.
Trends in the display industry are heavily influenced by the developments in the consumer electronics markets, and this is seen in the rapid growth of the OLED panel market due to the rising demand from smartphone and TV brands. In its recent analyses of the panel market by technology, WitsView, a division of TrendForce, finds that the market share of OLED in the small size bracket continues to grow at the expense of LCD’s market share. Furthermore, WitsView anticipates OLED’s representation in the smartphone market will increase substantially following the release of iPhone X. With Apple expected to support this display technology in the future, the percentage of OLED models in the total annual smartphone shipments worldwide is projected to climb from 28% this year to 33% in 2018.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, forecasts that the global DRAM supply for 2018 will show an annual bit growth of just 19.6%, which is another low in recent years. The global top three major DRAM suppliers – Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron – are now in the midst of their capacity planning for 2018. DRAMeXchange points out that all three suppliers tend to be conservative with regard to next year’s capital outlays. They have opted to slow down their capacity expansions and technology migrations so that they can keep next year’s prices at the same high level as during this year’s second half. Doing so will also help them to sustain a strong profit margin.
