Chinese display panel manufacturer BOE (BOE) once again missed the opportunity to establish a solid cooperation with an international technology giant. Its plan to provide OLED screens for the Samsung Galaxy S27 base model has been halted. Industry insiders pointed out that BOE has repeatedly experienced "last-minute failures" in negotiations with Apple, Samsung and other companies in recent years, and the core issues still focus on mass production quality and quality control levels.
Previously, in order to offset the pressure of continued rising costs of memory chips and memory, Samsung had considered using OLED screens provided by BOE on the basic Galaxy S27 model to reduce the material cost of the entire machine. According to earlier reports, if it switches to BOE panels, Samsung's purchase unit price is expected to be about $5 cheaper per piece than its own display unit's products, thereby saving millions of dollars in machine shipments to lock in more adequate DRAM and NAND supplies for the next generation of flagship models.
However, the latest news from Korean media ETNews shows that this cooperation ultimately failed to come to fruition, and Samsung has decided not to use BOE’s OLED screen in the Galaxy S27 basic model. This means that after missing out on Apple, BOE once again fell short on a key project with Samsung, losing important orders in the two major high-end smartphone markets.
In the Apple camp, BOE has been excluded from the OLED supply list for the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and foldable iPhone Fold due to quality control issues. All relevant orders are currently undertaken by South Korea's Samsung Display and LG Display, which further consolidates the dominant position of Korean panel manufacturers in the high-end smartphone OLED supply chain.
Although the report did not give specific technical or business details of Samsung's final abandonment of BOE, the industry generally believes that panel quality and production capacity stability are likely to be key considerations. For Samsung, the Galaxy S series is the global flagship product line, and display performance and reliability are core components of the brand image and user experience. If there are defects in screen quality, it will not only affect sales and reputation, but may also impact Samsung's long-term positioning in the high-end market.
The abortion of this cooperation is seen as a major blow to BOE, and it also makes it difficult for it to establish a more convincing brand reputation in the high-end OLED market through the channels of Samsung, the world's leading smartphone manufacturer. However, BOE is still not "raising the white flag" on the broader display market. In the notebook OLED field, BOE is competing fiercely with Samsung in an attempt to provide upgraded display solutions for high-end notebooks that are not in the Apple camp. In contrast, Apple's OLED orders for touch-sensitive MacBooks have been locked in by Samsung, which represents a more substantial and long-term business opportunity for the latter.
From a more macro supply chain perspective, after BOE successively lost Apple and Samsung’s high-end mobile phone OLED projects, it will be difficult to shake the dominance of Korean manufacturers in the high-end OLED market in the short term. However, in other market segments such as mid-range mobile phones, notebooks, and TVs, BOE still has the opportunity to win more international brand customers by leveraging its cost advantage and continuously improved technology. The focus of the industry is whether BOE can achieve stable breakthroughs in quality and yield to re-enter the core supply chain of high-demand customers such as Apple and Samsung.
At present, the OLED supply of the Galaxy S27 basic model is expected to still be undertaken by Samsung's own display department or other mature suppliers to ensure the consistent performance of the new generation flagship machine in terms of display effect and reliability. For BOE, this time it missed a big order again, which will undoubtedly prompt it to conduct deeper reflections and adjustments on quality management and international cooperation strategies.