Micro LED display shipments are expected to exceed 15.5 million units in 2026

At WWDC in early June, apple unveiled its Pro Display XDR, a 32-inch IPS Display with a resolution of 6016×3384 and a aspect ratio of 16:9.The display's biggest feature is LED backlighting, with a full-screen stable brightness of 1,000 nits, far higher than normal displays.

Apple's Pro Display XDR Display is not micro LED technology, because the 576 blue LED used by apple is about 600 microns in size, larger than the mini LED about 100 microns, but the industry believes that apple's Pro Display XDR Display will promote the development of micro LED and mini LED technology.

The main reason hinders the popularity of mini LED and micro LED is cost. Currently, it is difficult to produce micro LED. The higher the brightness, resolution and other indicators, the higher the requirements for LED, which will also lead to increased production cost and difficulty.

Figure 1: IHS Markit's micro LED market shipment forecast.

According to the global micro LED industry research report released by IHS Markit recently, the shipments of 2019 and 2020 are less than 1,000 units, which can be ignored, and the shipments will only start to be visible in 2021.The turning point, however, will come in 2024, when micro LED manufacturers will be able to solve the cost problem and micro LED displays will increase dramatically to more than 4 million units.

IHS Markit predicts that by 2026, with 15.5 million micro LED displays shipped, the cost of a 75-inch micro LED display will drop to about 20 percent of what it is today.

Even so, the 2026 micro LED display is still out of the mainstream, accounting for only 0.4% of the world's flat display reserve.