On the occasion of the 7th International Meeting on Information Display (IMID) to be held at EXCO in Daegu for five days from August 27 to August 31, the Korea IT Times interviewed Lee Sang-wan, chairman of the Korea Display Industry Association (KDIA) and chief executive officer of Samsung Electronics' LCD Business. At the interview, we asked him about the current issues facing the display industry and the future plans of the Association. The following is an edited excerpt of the answers from the interview.

Trends and features of IMID 2007

In its seventh year this year, the International Meeting on Information Display (IMID) 2007 is the first event to be held since the establishment of the Korea Display Industry Association in April this year. And the association expects the IMID 2007 to be a stage of festival where industry people from every corner of display business will be gathered.

The theme of this year's exhibition is Coexistence and Harmony and we have tried hard to raise the satisfaction level of participants higher than last year. In addition, Samsung Electronics, which is the principal player of the exhibition, has decided to move its booth to the exhibition hall's third floor for the cause of coexistence and harmony. The third floor is an exhibition space with relatively less visitors, and our action is well received by the participants on the same floor.

In regard to exhibition content, we plan to focus on securing the future market in advance by raising the proportion of display items of cost-effective alternate materials, production technologies with innovations, and future display devices such as Flexibles.

Measures to remove feeling of crisis

For some time, Korea has fulfilled a rapid growth that enabled the country to become a super power in the field of displays. However, in the past two years after the rapid growth, the earnings have deteriorated greatly due to oversupply and fall in prices, a worldwide phenomenon not unique to Korea. Moreover, a perspective presenting a structural crisis rose due to the chase of China and the bouncing back of Japan and the feeble state of Korea's parts and equipment industry.

In such surroundings, the theme of crisis has provided a momentum for the industry to deeply feel the need to seek a joint advancement based on coexistence. For this cause, the KDIA was established to play a central role. With the association at the center, a cooperative system between the public and private sectors and the private businesses themselves was formed. Based on this cooperative system, we plan to resolve the crisis by helping to foster the base industry of parts, equipment, and materials and beef up the industry's health with mid and long-term perspectives.

LCD market forecast and direction for future investment

In my capacity as CEO of Samsung Electronics' LCD Business and as chairman of KDIA, I am keenly interested in the business state and prospects of the overall display industry that includes LCDs, PDPs, and OLEDs. The world display market is forecast to grow by more than 10 percent to 90 billion dollars this year, and I project that the PDP and OLED market, in particular, will grow by about 20 to 30 percent from last year.

With respect to the TV panels market, I forecast that the market will grow by 82 percent annually in terms of the total amount of panel surface produced, thereby leading the growth of the display industry. Especially in the case of LCDs for TVs, the market is forecast to grow by more than 20 percent on average annually to a 50 billion dollar market in 2010.

The stockpiles of panels are already showing signs of stabilizing, and no oversupply- driven price falls are projected until the year 2009 as the manufacturers have mostly postponed investment. Moreover, if companies endeavor to secure profitability through production innovation and cost reduction and aim to secure the price-sensitive TV market in advance, the market conditions will improve to see new investments made as early as the latter half of this year. The parts and materials businesses will also improve as a whole.

In regard to future investment, Samsung Electronics plans to make contributions to consolidating the national base for the parts and materials industry that is the source of competitiveness. To this end, Samsung aims to further bolster joint research with the companies in the parts and materials business and, at the same time expand the number of strategic partners.

Regarding the direction for R&D investment on the national level, we should cast off the existing practice of engaging in performance- driven research for improving the advanced technologies from abroad for short-term gains. Instead, we should take a mid to long-term view and focus on the parts and materials field that can be the base for the industry's overall growth and national competitiveness. With this in mind we have undertaken to reform the government's R&D policy with the association playing a central role.

Current state of assistance for the parts and materials sector

After the establishment of KDIA we set our foremost goal on helping SMEs in the parts and materials business. As part of this goal we conducted a survey of our member companies to find out their present state and difficulties. According to the survey, it was found that more than 90 percent of the member companies are parts and materials producers. The companies with sales of less than 50 billion won (US$54 million) account for 63 percent while the companies with less than 300 employees take up 79 percent. The display parts and materials companies are hoping for large R&D assistance funds, market information of home and abroad, information exchanges with big companies, an around-the-clock response system, and assistance for overseas advancement such as the dispatch of market study missions.

To this end, we organized four support teams to assist the parts and materials business: a research support team for operating the government's R&D projects and for securing new funds, an industry support team for cooperative coexistence and for hunting down corporate difficulties, a survey support team for providing market and industry information and for overseas advancement, and a management support team to find corporate bottlenecks.

Advice for cooperative coexistence among 3 display countries

More than any other industry field, the global partnership among the companies in the display field has been in good operation, and this has been the driving force behind the technology development of displays and industrial growth. However, the fact is that there is no cooperative system between the countries. In the case of semiconductors, on the other hand, there is the World Semiconductor Council (WSC) that seeks to improve regulations and systems for promoting the cooperation among the countries producing semiconductors. The member countries of the council include six major players of the industry, and they seek to improve regulations and systems, make counteractions on environmental issues, and improve the system for intellectual property rights. Likewise, our association, too, plans to seek global coexistence and cooperation among the panel producing countries that happen to be concentrated in Northeast Asia; that is Japan, Taiwan, and China. Specifically, we plan to set up a system that can handle the matters related with the information sharing between the producers, cope with the issues of intellectual property rights, request governments to improve systems and jointly deal with the regulations of North America and Europe. To achieve this, we plan to arrange a meeting among the heads of display associations so that they can discuss ways to enhance mutual cooperation within the end of this year.