Samsung Display Brand Guidelines: From LCD Joint Venture to OLED and QD-OLED

An LCD business inside Samsung Electronics.

Samsung Display is younger than its business. The Korea Times reported in May 2022 that the display affiliate was first formed in 1991 as an LCD business arm of Samsung Electronics, and formally launched as Samsung Display in 2012. English Wikipedia dates Samsung Electronics’ launch of its TFT-LCD business to January 1991 and its first domestic TFT-LCD line to February 1995.

The next step was a partnership. In 2004, English Wikipedia says, Samsung Electronics and Sony set up S-LCD Corporation in South Chungcheong province as a joint venture to make amorphous TFT LCD panels, with Samsung holding 51 percent and Sony 49 percent; its panels went into both companies’ LCD televisions. S-LCD began shipping seventh-generation TFT LCD panels for televisions in April 2005 and eighth-generation panels in August 2007, and in April 2008 it reported a monthly capacity of 150,000 LCD panels, 50,000 of them based on PVA technology, English Wikipedia says. In December 2011 the partners announced that Samsung would buy Sony’s entire stake, and the purchase was completed in January 2012.

Samsung Display Corporation itself was established on 1 April 2012; Korean Wikipedia describes it as a spin-off of Samsung Electronics’ LCD division. On 1 July 2012 it merged with S-LCD and with Samsung Mobile Display, Samsung’s OLED manufacturing business, according to English Wikipedia, which says the merger made it the world’s largest display company.

It remained part of the group. The Korea JoongAng Daily reported in March 2020 that Samsung Display was 84.78 percent owned by Samsung Electronics.

AMOLED, curved edges and foldables.

Samsung’s OLED work predates the merger. English Wikipedia’s timeline records an investment in Gen-4.5 AMOLED mass production in November 2003, which it describes as a world first, and the start of AMOLED mass production in October 2007; Korean Wikipedia gives the same dates.

After 2012 the panels became part of the shape of Samsung’s phones and watches. English Wikipedia says Samsung Display mass-produced its first curved edge display panel, used in the Galaxy Note Edge, in August 2014; circular OLED panels for smartwatches in September 2015; Y-OCTA panels, with touch built into the OLED, in July 2016; and foldable displays, mass-produced and commercialised from April 2019. Korean Wikipedia adds the dual-edge panel of the Galaxy S6 Edge in 2015 and the quad-edge panel of the Galaxy S7 Edge in 2016.

The newest technology is QD-OLED, a hybrid of quantum dots and OLED. The Korea Times reported in December 2021 that Samsung Display had held a ceremony at its Asan plant marking the start of QD-OLED panel production, on a line, Q1, that had previously made LCD panels; the company had announced its QD-OLED investment plan in October 2019. The first televisions followed: Sony announced its A95K with Samsung Display’s QD-OLED panels in January 2022, and Samsung Electronics its S95B in March 2022, English Wikipedia says.

English Wikipedia lists the company’s display markets as smartphones, televisions, laptops, computer monitors, smartwatches, virtual reality, handheld game consoles and cars.

Panels and documentation.

Display-panel makers sell to other companies, so most people meet their work under someone else’s name: the screen in a phone, a television, a laptop or a car dashboard. Their own identities are built for customers, investors and engineers, and they come into view most clearly at trade shows such as the Society for Information Display’s Display Week in the United States and CES in Las Vegas, where makers book large stands to show what their panels can do.

The visual language of those stands is the product itself. Huge curved screens, rollable televisions that rise out of a base and transparent panels set in shop windows or furniture sit beside foldable phones photographed mid-fold and car cockpits wrapped in a single sweep of glass. Close-up photography does the rest: macro shots of red, green and blue sub-pixels, flexible films bent between two fingers and wafer-thin edges seen side-on.

Behind the show floor sits the factory. Company films and reports often show clean fab halls, workers in full-body suits and large sheets of glass substrate carried by robot arms, with plants described by “generation,” a measure of the glass size each line handles. Industry awards add another layer of presentation: Display Week’s Display of the Year awards and CES Innovation Awards appear in the makers’ own timelines.

Their histories run through joint ventures, factory sales and regulatory cases as much as through product launches. This guide sets out what can be checked about each one — who founded it, who owns it and where its panels are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Leaving LCD behind.

The move to OLED meant leaving LCD. In March 2020 the Korea JoongAng Daily reported that Samsung Display planned to halt LCD production at Asan, in South Chungcheong, and at Suzhou in China, and to shift towards quantum-dot displays, after losing ground to Chinese panel makers. The exit took longer than planned. The Korea Times reported in May 2022 that the original plan to close the LCD business in late 2020 had been delayed at Samsung Electronics’ request, after a sudden rise in LCD prices during the pandemic, and that the business would now close in June 2022, with its staff expected to move to the QD business. The same report noted that Samsung Electronics, the largest buyer of Samsung Display’s products, had been sourcing LCD panels from other makers, including BOE and AU Optronics.

English Wikipedia records how the LCD assets were passed on: the Suzhou LCD factory was sold to TCL Technology’s China Star Optoelectronics Technology in April 2021, and the LCD patents went to the same company in June 2022, when Samsung Display ended LCD production and became a maker of OLED panels only.

Today, English Wikipedia says, the company is headquartered in South Korea, has production plants in China, Vietnam and India, and runs sales offices in six countries. Korean Wikipedia places the head office in Giheung, in Yongin, Gyeonggi province, while the Korea Times and the Korea JoongAng Daily describe Asan as a main production site.

An older link survives in its holdings. Korean Wikipedia says Samsung and Corning formed the glass joint venture Samsung Corning Precision Glass in 1973, and that in 2013 the Samsung side sold its stake to Corning in exchange for Corning shares; English Wikipedia says Samsung Display still held Corning shares in 2025 as a result of that earlier venture.

For a design guide, Samsung Display shows a component maker whose name sits behind other companies’ products, inside both Samsung and Sony televisions. Compare Samsung, its parent brand, and Sony, its former LCD partner. For this guide we use navy, teal and cool white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Samsung Display’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.