Anti-trust bomb falls on LCD market

More EU probes could follow

Sharp is probably now fourth in LCD TV manufacture after Sony and the two Koreans, but continued investment in more LCD plants by all of these players has to drive prices down further and further.

The Sharp-Sony plant will make panels which are 2.8 metres by 3 metres, and support TV sets up to 60 inch formats at least, and be up and running in 2010. Similarly Panasonic, so long the global leader in plasma panel TV sets, which are becoming more and more unfashionable by the minute, is going to make a similar investment in a factory, in partnership with Toshiba and Hitachi.

Sharp was one of the other companies to be fined in the US case, but says that this time it has not received a statement of objection from the EU. The other company fined in the previous US action was Chunghwa Picture Tubes, from Taiwan.

All of this is without the investment that will soon begin to chase OLED screens, whether these be AMOLEDs where Samsung leads or one of the other variants of flat TV screens which can go to fractions of a millimetre thick, offer far better contrasts, use other LEDs which also don't require backlit screens and which use a fraction of the power of an LCD screen.

So far there are few details of the case. The Commission has confirmed it sent Statement of Objections to a number of players in May 2009. While it goes a long way to making it clear in its announcement that this is early days, and nothing is yet proven, this is really not the case. A statement of objections is sent after the area has been fully investigated - which implies that perhaps it does relate to events prior to the current recession.

It usually takes around 18 months for a Statement of Objections to be raised after a complaint is received, if one ever is raised. The next step is to listen to what the target companies have to say about it, usually followed by a fine and then an appeal to the European Court of First Instance.

The announcement did talk about thin, flat monitors used for example in mobile phones, televisions, computers, digital watches and pocket calculators – clearly mentioning TV sets, something that was not part of the US case.

The Philips involvement may well be as a shareholder, not as an active player in the price fixing, in that it will have benefited because until recently it was a shareholder of LG Display. In fact Philips may even be one of the complainants, since it buys in screens from LG Display. “It is important to note that the statement of objections does not allege that Philips was directly involved in the infringement and that we received the statement of objections as a former shareholder of LG Display,” said a Philips spokesman in one European newspaper.

Copyright © 2009, Faultline

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