2023 China touch screen industry research report I

Chapter I industry overview

1.1 Definitions

Touch Panel (TP), also known as "touch screen" or "touch panel", relies on touch sensor technology to input information. According to the different working principles, the touch screen can be divided into resistive, capacitive, optical, ultrasonic and electromagnetic induction and other categories.

Capacitive touch screen has become the mainstream technology products because of its high sensitivity, good light transmission, strong stability and long service life. It supports multi-touch control and is widely used in intelligent consumer electronics, industrial medical equipment, smart home, office equipment and automotive electronics. Capacitive touch screen according to different technical routes, can be divided into two types of external and embedded.

The basic structure of the external capacitive screen is the separation of the touch panel and the LCD panel. It mainly includes film type and glass type two schemes, including GFF (cover plate +ITO film +ITO film), GF (cover plate +ITO film), GG (cover plate +ITO glass) and OGS (integrated touch control). Among them, GF scheme saves a layer of film compared with GFF scheme, while OGS is an upgrade scheme of GG. The advantages of the external structure scheme are simple process, mature process and low cost.

Different from the external type, the embedded capacitive screen integrates the touch panel and the LCD panel, mainly including In-Cell and OnCell. The embedded capacitive screen has the characteristics of thin and light, high transmittance, etc., but due to the high technical threshold, it needs to integrate the thin film transistor array circuit, and involves the development of the mask and process technology, which will increase the production cost. Therefore, the main application areas of the embedded capacitive screen are mainly concentrated in the smart phone market.

With the continuous progress of technology and the growth of market demand, touch screen technology will continue to be optimized to bring more convenience to People's Daily life and work. At the same time, different types and structures of touch screens will also play their unique advantages according to the different needs of the application field.

1.2 Brief history of the industry

The history of touch screen technology dates back to 1965, when E.A. Johnson invented what is widely considered to be the first finger-driven touch screen technology. He published an article in Electronic Letters titled "Touch display - a novel input/output device for computers," which outlined the first form of capacitive touch technology used in many modern personal devices.

Into the 1970s, Dr. Sam Hurst developed a new type of sensor called the "Elograph," an opaque touch screen that was very different from today's touch screens. The technique requires touching one conductive layer to another layer below containing the X and Y axes, and then transmitting the coordinates to a computer. We now call this touch screen technology "resistive" and it is one of the most commonly used touch screen technologies. In 1974, Hurst and his team developed the first transparent resistive touch screen, which was patented in 1977.

By 1982, Nimish Mehta of the University of Toronto had developed a "touchpad" device that used frosted glass and had a camera behind it that could identify shadows and dark spots on the screen. This gesture interaction technique was later used by American computer artist Myron Krueger to design an optical system that could track hand movements. Originally called Video Place, the system was later renamed Video Desk in 1983.

In the 1980s, touch screens became commercially available and HP (then Hewlett-Packard) introduced the HP-150 computer. The computer is equipped with a 9-inch CRT display with an infrared ray (IR) detector on the edge to detect the user's finger interaction with the screen. In 1983, Bob Boie of Bell Labs created a new transparent touch overlay by using capacitor arrays on CRTS, an advance that laid the foundation for capacitor technology in today's tablets and smartphones.

In 1993, IBM and BellSouth introduced the Simon Personal Communicator, the first mobile phone to feature touch screen technology. The device features advanced paging, email, appointment calendar, address book, calculator, and is equipped with a resistive touch screen for navigating menus and entering data.

In the late '90s, Wayne Westerman, a graduate student at the University of Delaware, published a paper titled "Hand Tracking, Finger Identification, "and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface," detailing the mechanism of multi-point capacitor technology as we know it today. Westerman then founded a company called FingerWorks and began making gesture-based products, including the iGesture pad; The device allows one hand to gesture. In 2005, FingerWorks was acquired by Apple, and two years later, the technology was widely used in Apple's phones and music players.

With the large-scale adoption of projected capacitive touch technology in smartphones and tablets, the demand for touch screen technology is gradually increasing, especially in large format business applications such as digital signage, industrial and point of sale (POS), and the interactive needs of these applications are driving further innovation and development of touch screen technology

1.3 Development status

China's touch screen industry is currently in the reshuffle stage, the industry enterprises are facing overcapacity, economic downturn and other pressures, the compound annual growth rate is only about 10%, the industry urgently needs to seek new growth points. Personal consumer electronics is the most widely used field of touch screen, accounting for more than 80% of the touch screen market share, which in turn to smart phones, tablet computers, and popular wearable devices in recent years, the largest demand for touch screen, personal consumer electronics market demand changes will have a profound impact on the touch screen industry.

The demand for smartphones is here to stay. From 2013 to 2020, China's smartphone shipments showed volatile changes, with the increasingly saturated Chinese smartphone market, consumer demand for new devices slowed down, shipments began to decline in 2017. A total of 296 million smartphones will be shipped in China in 2020, a decrease of 20.4% year-on-year. From January to October 2021, China's smartphone shipments reached 28,200 units, an increase of 12% year-on-year.

Despite the overall downward trend of China's smartphone shipments in recent years, with the continuous upgrading of smartphones and the improvement of residents' consumption level, the smartphone market will shift from incremental to stock, and the demand for replacement will always exist, so the demand for touch screens will also exist for a long time.

Chinese smartphone shipments

Source: Asset Information network thousand international investment bank Pudong Bank International

Demand for tablets is picking up. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought great changes to people's work, study and life, with telecommuting beginning to be implemented in many industries, online education developing by leaps and leaps, and video entertainment growing rapidly, leading to a sharp increase in the tablet and laptop markets. From 2015 to 2018, China's tablet computer market has been in a downward state, but the decline has gradually slowed down, since 2019, China's tablet computer market has picked up, and the annual shipment of about 23.39 million units in 2020, an increase of 4.37%. In the future, the Chinese tablet market will continue to grow thanks to the booming development of online education in the country, the use of productivity tools, and the increasing demand for entertainment such as video games.

Chinese tablet shipments

Source: Asset Information network thousand international investment bank Wind

The demand for wearable devices continues to expand. Global wearable device shipments rose steadily from 2015 to 2020, reaching 104 million units in 2020.

Global wearable device shipments

Source: Asset Information Network thousand international investment bank IImedia consulting

Touch-screen shipments are growing faster. In the case of increased demand in the field of personal consumer electronics, the domestic epidemic is gradually under control, and the rapid development of other downstream application areas, it is expected that China's touch screen industry will recover in the future, and the compound annual growth rate will increase slightly.

According to New Materials Online statistics, the global touch screen market grew from $3.6 billion in 2008 to $30 billion in 2016, with a compound annual growth rate of about 27%. With the promotion of large screens on mobile phones, it is expected to maintain an annual growth of about 5% from 2017 to 2020, and the global touch product market will be $36.5 billion in 2020.

2008 to 2020 global touch screen market growth statistics

Source: Asset Information Network Qianji Investment bank Guohai Securities Research Institute

Therefore, the overall demand for touch screens in the field of personal consumer electronics in China has expanded, the demand for wearable devices and tablet computers has continued to increase, and the demand for smart phones has changed from incremental to stock, and the demand has declined but has been stable for a long time. In the future, China's touch screen industry will gradually get rid of the predicament of declining operating efficiency, and the growth rate of shipments and market size will be increased.