LG to inaugurate plasma panel line tomorrow

LG Electronics Inc. will officially open its new plasma display panel production line tomorrow, after completing a two-month trial run. The new production line will be able to churn out 120,000 panels per month initially, increasing to 160,000 by the end of this year, the company said yesterday in a press release. LG Electronics has invested 660 billion won ($638.2 million) in the facility in Gumi, North Gyeongsang province, since May 2004. The company currently produces 190,000 such screens per month in total, but the addition of the new plant means production should reach 350,000 units by the end of this year. “As market competition intensifies, production cost competitiveness is becoming ever more important,” said Yoon Kwang-ho, vice president of LG Electronics. “As we will use technology that can produce eight panels from a single pane of glass, the number of processes and time required will decrease sharply,” he added. With the new facility, LG Electronics expects to become the world’s biggest producer of plasma display panels by the end of this year, overtaking Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. of Japan. It also expects to take the largest global market share. As of the end of March, Samsung SDI Co. had 33.1 percent of the global PDP module market, followed by LG Electronics with 31.9 percent and Matsushita with 14.5 percent. But in a bid to close the gap with the top two producers, Matsushita increased production by 60,000 screens a month in the first quarter and is planning to open new lines with a monthly capacity of 150,000 screens in the last quarter of this year, lifting the company’s overall production capacity to 305,000 screens a month by the end of the year. Currently, Samsung SDI produces 250,000 screens a month. “Demand for plasma screens is expected to grow to 10 million units next year from this year’s 6.5 million,” said an LG Electronics official. by Park Sung-ha, Kim Chang-woo