Sony quits consumer OLED TV business

In a very surprising turn of events, Daily Yomiuri Online has reported that Sony will be quitting the OLED TV business for the consumer market. It will however continue to manufacture TVs and displays for corporate clients, but not for the mainstream consumer market. This is even more shocking, since their competitors, LG and Samsung are going all out this year with OLED TVs and hope to finally launch it commercially in the market. Sony will continue to concentrate on LCD TVs, at least for this year.

Abandoning ship?

Back in 2007, Sony was the first in the world to unveil an OLED-based TV that really showed the company as a front runner, in terms of developing cutting edge technology. The TV was no doubt supremely expensive to manufacture and was only in prototype stages at that point. They had once been the only manufacturer of OLED panels, but due to poor business performance, lagged behind their South Korean rivals in terms of sales. The main reason why OLED TVs took such a long time to commercially launch was due to the fact that they were notoriously difficult to produce in large quantities at a profitable rate. That issue seems to be in the past, with LG and Samsung both trying to take OLED TVs mainstream this year.