Fully digital screens are replacing speedometers and dials in vehicles, making industry leader Japan Display Inc optimistic about boosting sales to global automakers.
While most new models usually have a center information panel for maps, entertainment and other functions, manufacturers are also increasingly replacing the dashboard facing the driver with a flat screen.
Look inside the latest BMW or Mercedes-Benz, chances are Japan Display made the panel.
Replacing instrument clusters with screens is challenging, because they need to be more reliable and withstand swings in temperature, while providing critical information for the driver.
That also makes them more expensive and lets display suppliers demand higher margins, making them an attractive enterprise.
Japan Display, the world’s biggest supplier of car panels, is betting that the shift to electric vehicles would make screens the key selling point for any car, as drivers pay more attention to the interior aesthetics of vehicles than what is under the hood.
“It used to be all about the engine — how many cylinders, how much horse power, the sound of it — but with electric vehicles that’s all gone,” Japan Display automotive business head Holger Gerkens said in an interview. “How do you create attraction? You can do a lot with displays.”
Digital dashboards also offer advantages for drivers, for example changing the style and amount of information for different driving modes, making maps more prominent when needed.
For now, they are mostly used in high-end cars made by Audi, Mercedes-Benz and some supercar manufacturers.
Japan Display’s automotive operations last fiscal year generated ¥100 billion (US$904 million) in revenue, about 14 percent of its total. It forecasts that sales are to grow 40 percent by March 2020.
The company, which already supplies about 30 percent of the European car market, is expanding in the US, Japan and China, Gerkens said.
The company controlled 19 percent of the US$6.7 billion global market for automotive displays last year, according to IHS Markit. LG Display Co was second with 14 percent.
Sluggish smartphone sales, which make up about 80 percent of revenue, are also behind the firm’s bid to increase automotive sales. In addition, Apple Inc, the company’s biggest customer, is shifting to next-generation OLED displays, which Japan Display does not produce in mass quantities.
Adoption of OLEDs in cars would probably take longer. Unlike liquid-crystal displays, OLED pixels can glow on their own and do not require a backlight, which makes them thinner and more energy efficient.
These are significant advantages when it comes to smartphones, but automakers are likely to be more concerned with OLED’s limited lifetime and considerably higher price, Gerkens said.
“We are moving away from flat rectangular-shaped displays,” Gerkens said. “The future will be more and more design driven.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day