Starting in 1995, Samsung went into full TFT production manufacturing 100,000 units that first year followed by 1 million units through 1997. In the year 2000, Samsung had rolled out their 10-millionth panel and buy 2003 they had reached production of 10 million units.

In terms of the glass substrate sizes, the first line was 370x470mm. The 7-1 Line in Tangjeong today uses the world’s largest mother glass of 1870x2200mm, 24 times larger than in 1995, making it efficient for mass production. Line 7-1 started mass production mainly on 32″ and 40″ panels for large TVs in April this year. Plans are to reach a full-capacity of 60,000 substrates per month by October. The company’s Line 7-2 also will start mass production in the first half of next year.

A lot of moving and shaking has been going on over at Samsung as the company made several large announcements this year. First of all the company announced a couple weeks ago they have developed a 40-inch OLED display. Manufactured on Samsung’s fourth generation (4G) production line with a mother-glass size of 730mm x 920mm this new OLED display features a 5000:1 contrast ratio.

Samsung also announced they would be moving more manufacturing facilities to China in an effort to lower the cost of production.

Below is a list of manufacturing plants which produce TFT LCD displays for Samsung and their overall output:

Reference Data

— Status of Samsung Electronics’ Large TFT-LCD Production (Cumulative)

(Thousand units) ———————————————————————- Year      1995     1997      1999      2000       2003    May 2005 ———————————————————————- # of Units   100      1,000     5,000    10,000     50,000    100,000 ———————————————————————-