May 10 th sees the US-China trade dispute escalating yet again as the US continues to hike tariffs on US$200 billion worth of Chinese imports, going from 10% to 25%. TrendForce points out that TVs , monitors, notebooks and other display products were not among the US$250 billion worth of goods hit by the 25% tariffs, thus the current impact on panels and the display industry remains to be fairly limited.
TrendForce, a global market research institute, revealed in its latest notebook shipment report that although CPUs continued their trend of undersupply in 1Q19, it didn't cause too big of an impact on the notebook market as a whole. Global notebook shipments for the first quarter came up to 36.97 million units, a miniscule 0.8% decline compared to the same quarter last year, which registered 37.27 million units.
According to research by DRAMeXchange , a division of TrendForce , the NAND flash industry this year is clearly exhibiting signs of oversupply, and SSD suppliers have gotten themselves into a price war, causing SSD prices for PC OEMs to take a dive. Average contract prices for 512GB and 1TB SSDs have a chance to plunge below US$0.1 per GB by the end of this year, hitting an all-time low. This change will cause 512GB SSDs to replace their 128GB counterparts and become market mainstream, second only to 256GB SSDs. We may also look forward to PCIe SSDs achieving 50% market penetration, since PCIe SSDs and SATA SSDS are nearly identical in price.
According to the latest report by TrendForce, big brands such as Vivo, Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO and Samsung have extended FOD (Fingerprint on Display) technology down from flagship devices to mid-high tier smartphones, enlarging market scale and causing the costs of FOD tech to slide. Penetration rates for optical and ultrasonic FOD solutions are therefore predicted to surpass that of traditional capacitive solutions and become the mainstream technology for smartphone fingerprint recognition in 2022.
TrendForce states that the global 3D sensing market for smartphones has grown from 819 million USD in 2017 to 3.08 billion USD in 2018 as iPhones make a complete switch to structured light 3D sensing solutions. Yet due to smartphone suppliers mostly focusing on fingerprint on display (FOD), the global smartphone 3D sensing market is expected to grow by 26.3%, to a scale of 3.89 billion USD. Apple, anticipated to take up TOF technology in 2020, may boost market development and bring YoY growth up to 53.1%.