At the Mobile World Congress in 2019, two exorbitantly priced foldable smart phones quickly became the eye-catchers. Huawei Mate X featured a price tag of $2,600 while SamSung Galaxy Fold would set you back at $1,980.
Why is there such a huge price difference between foldable smart phones and normal smart phones? The answer lies in the flexible materials used to produce these phones.
Why are foldable smart phones so expensive
Foldable phones have strict requirements on materials
From concepts to prototyping, the development of foldable smart phones is a solid proof of breakthroughs in flexible materials and craftsmanship. The flexible structure of foldable screen consists of two parts: display and touch. Display connects machine to people while touch connects people to machine.
The display part of foldable phone is powered by flexible OLED panel, jointly produced by SamSung, BOE and Visionox. Huake Tek, the partner of OLED manufacturers, is devoted to the technology of the touch layer on the display. Foldable screen has extremely strict requirements on the durability and flexibility of materials, which means that the material must be able to bend over 200,000 times at a radius of one millimeter while keeping perfect shape.
To realize touch function on flexible screen, Huake Tek has developed a type of transparent, conductive silver nanowire in house that is 500 times thinner than a human hair. The silver nanowire then is coated on bendable CPI film, improving the bending resistance while realizing the touch function.
Prices will drop drastically after mass production
The factors contributing to the high prices of foldable phones lie on the limited scale of manufacturing output and high ratio of defective OLED display. Flexible OLED technology used to be monopolized by SamSung, now it’s mastered by domestic manufacturers, and OLED display used in manufacturing Huawei Mate X was supplied by a Chinese company BOE. As long as OLED displays can go into mass production, prices of foldable phones would drop drastically.
Take the price of touch display as example, the cost of ITO material for normal smart phones range from $10-20, while flexible material for touch display of foldable phones costs around $100, 5 times as much as of normal smart phones. It’s estimated that the price of display touch would reduce to $50 next year, and prices of foldable phones would also drop to 50%.
The ecosystem of Shenzhen has provided unrivaled advantages for R&D
As “The Global silicon valley of hardware”, Shenzhen’s unrivaled ecosystem of electronic manufacturing has provided lots of advantages for product research and development. From raw materials to coating, to the production of touch sensor and final testing, the complete process can be done in Shenzhen within a day, while in the US it might take about half a year. The next step these China electronic manufacturers take is to improve conformity rate of OLED display, and expand the production scale, while at the same time striving to make the silver nanowire as thinner as 8 nanometers, thus improving the transparency and clarity of the OLED display.
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