Panasonic liquidates its liquid crystal display business

Panasonic has announced it has quit the Liquid Crystal Display business and will use the factory where it made the units to build batteries instead. The Japanese giant foreshadowed the move in 2020, but yesterday announced it hadn't just quit the business, but liquidated it – and even waived around $4 billion in debt owed to …

[Pascal Monett]

So, they were late to the party, didn't choose the right market, and then Trump happened.

$4 billion ? Goes to show that money isn't always the solution.

[Martin an gof]

So who does actually make panels these days?

I have a largeish fleet of Panasonic professional displays and projectors. Both have been very reliable (had our first plasma panel failure just a few months ago - the panel was 18+ years old). One of the benefits of Panasonic was the end-to-end production, bar the DLP units in the projectors (and possibly projector LCDs too - never been certain about that). I suppose it's time for a review of the market.

M.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So who does actually make panels these days?

I seem to recall that Panasonic bought the (high-end) Pioneer KURA plasma screen tech a few years ago, when Pioneer stopped making such displays (which were exceedingly good quality).

And then the market switched to lower-energy consuming displays (such as LED) rather than plasma.

I guess that the demand for flat screen TVs has dwindled and more competitiveness in the OEM market from Chinese-made screens has lead to Panasonic reviewing this market.

[tip pc]

Re: So who does actually make panels these days?

Panasonic bought Kuro ~2009. People still rave about Kuro's even now.

i have 2 x Panasonic vierra plasmas (2007 & 2012) that are still going strong &show a great picture. I have a Panasonic vierra OLED too which is also extremely good.

Panasonic stopped making plasmas in 2013.

If you buy an OLED the screen is made by LG regardless of the badge on the box/remote/screen,

[Piro]

Re: So who does actually make panels these days?

Lucky Goldstar is your best bet

[Kev99]

I wonder if slumping PC sales is a result of buyers realising that yesterday's kit does the job just as well as today's but without the hype and questionable "improvements". Maybe gaining a few nanoseconds in processing speed is important to Fermi Labs but to the vast majority of users they couldn't care less.

[John Brown (no body)]

Been saying that for years. The actual, needful replacement cycle is at least twice as long as the OEM marketing departments would have us believe :-) More so now that so much office type work is done "in the cloud" in browser based apps.

Not for everyone, of course, but many, many users only need a new computer because age means things are more likely to fail. If you have a large fleet all bought at more or less the same time, 5 years down the line, the replacement rate starts going up and users lose time waiting for the fix or replace. The failure rate is what determines the replacement cycle for most corporate or other large users.