LG Exits Blu-ray Business, Sells LCD Factory
Any home theater enthusiast who has been in the hobby for more than a few years surely remembers when Oppo exited the Blu-ray business back in 2018. It came as a major blow, and a sign of the changing times for optical media. Samsung followed suit in 2019, leaving LG, Sony, and Panasonic as the only major consumer electronics companies producing Blu-ray players. Now, LG has pulled the plug as well. LG has discontinued the production of all Blu-ray players, including the UHD UBK80 and UBK90, which the company introduced in 2018. LG had not introduced a new model in the intervening years. According to LG, both the UBK80 and UBK90 will be sold while stocks last, but remaining units are limited. In a statement to FlatpanelsHD, LG Korea said that the company would not rule out a return to the optical player business if demand increases, but that seems incredibly unlikely.
As of now, Panasonic and Sony are still offering UHD players, but it’s worth pointing out that neither company has updated its offerings in several years. The best-selling version of Sony’s PlayStation 5 console has dropped the optical drive altogether, though it’s available as an optional accessory. The story is the same with Microsoft’s Xbox Series X console; both platforms support downloadable games, rendering optical discs unnecessary for many users. LG’s decision to pull out of the Blu-ray business is just the latest event in a multi-year decline brought on by the advent, and eventual domination, of streaming video services like Netflix. That company, which grew to prominence during a time when it was just a DVD mailing service, completely shuttered the DVD service in 2023, around the same time that Best Buy announced that its stores would no longer carry DVDs and Blu-ray discs.
LG Sells LCD Factory
LG’s announcement that it would no longer manufacture Blu-ray players came just a few months after the company’s display-manufacturing arm agreed to sell a large LCD factory, presumably to focus its attention on OLED. The LCD plant in question, located in Guangzhou, China, is being sold to China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT), a subsidiary of rival TV maker TCL. LG previously sold its domestic LCD factory, located in the city of Paju, in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, back in 2020. In that same year, CSOT acquired Samsung Display’s LCD plant in Suzhou, China.
The sale of LG’s Chinese factory is expected to earn the company as much as $1.5 billion. Since the sale of the Korean facility in 2020, LG has continued to scale back its LCD business while pouring more resources into OLED. Although LCD TVs still make up the largest portion of the global TV market, LG Display is a market leader in OLED, where margins aren’t quite as slim and demand is on the rise. The company produces OLED panels not only for LG Electronics, but also for Sony, Panasonic, and Philips TVs. As of now, the only other company producing OLED panels for the TV market is Samsung Display, whose QD-OLED panels are used in high-end sets made by Samsung and Sony. LCD TVs are still popular among those who want a very affordable TV, a super-bright TV, or a truly massive TV (larger than LG Display’s 83-inch OLED panels). But as we’ve been saying since 2020, it seems that LCD’s days are numbered.