01732 759725 24 Q&A TR: Putting software to one side for now, what are the big development in display technologies? AH: Perhaps the biggest growth area in LED is in narrow pixel pitch, particularly the sub 2mm area. Last year, the split between LED and large format displays of over 90 inches, whether that’s standalone displays or video walls, was roughly 50:50. If you look at the market projections going through to 2025, there’s going to be more of a 70:30 split in favour of LED. That’s being driven by several factors. LED technology is becoming cheaper to build and cheaper to take to market and it’s become far easier to install because of things like our All In One solutions, so that total cost of ownership is coming down. And it’s far easier to repair than it used to be – you no longer need to package goods up and send them back to the factory; we’ve got fantastic repair facilities in multiple locations, so turnaround times have come down as well. These factors all point to LED being the more economical solution in the longer term. Of course, that doesn’t for one second mean that we’re moving away from large format displays because there’ll always be market demand for LFD as well. TR: What are the advantages of LFD? AH: At the moment, with LED, we’ve come down from 2mm pixel pitchto 1.5 to 1.2 to 0.9 and we’re now seeing products coming to market at .67mm, which is about the same size as the pixels in a large format display from a couple of years ago. What that means is you can pick a large format display of 90 inches or a good quality LED display of about 110 inches. We’re now bringing the technology down further so we can do a 55-inch compatible LED module, which is the same size as a video wall panel, so you can see where that piece is going. If we look at consumer TVs, we have really good 4K TVs at home; 4K is also prevalent across most meeting rooms, but that is now turning to 8K. We’ve had 8K displays in the market for a while and certain sectors are really picking up on them, particularly retail sectors. As 8K becomes more prevalent, it will go into meeting room spaces. Not all meeting rooms want a large display. Some are quite happy with a 55-inch or even smaller display and LED doesn’t meet that requirement yet – I think it’ll be a few years before it does and even then the cost differential might be a little too much. Some customers will still take LED because they want that ‘wow’ factor for clients; others will be more than happy with a high quality 8K display. TR: The provision of diverse meeting spaces is a growing trend in the corporate world being driven by hybrid working, which brings us back to COVID. That was a massive shock to the displays sector because no one could get into anyone’s premises. Since then there have been other shocks, like chip shortages and war. How has Samsung coped with these challenges? AH: We did a pretty good job of managing everything throughout that period. As you say, COVID was a very difficult time from a business perspective, but throughout 2019 we still saw quite significant growth. A lot of that was down to our monitor division, which falls under professional displays. People were no longer able to go into the office and found that working off their laptop display was unacceptable, so we saw a significant uplift in sales of professional monitors during that period. As we transitioned out of COVID and offices started to open up, there was that pent-up demand from corporate refresh phases and new builds that needed to be finished quickly, which helped almost to kickstart the market. The chip shortage was a frustration for everybody in the industry. But one of the things we did as a business was to evaluate how our displays were being used and which ports or inputs on displays were being used the least. We then took the chips from those ports to ensure that we like proof of play on a display. If you are an advertiser paying for primetime slots, we can allow you to see exactly what’s been displayed and when it’s been displayed. We can also work with IT departments in small to medium-sized corporate environments to manage every single display on their network. We’ve all gone to sit down in a meeting and found that the last person in there has unplugged the network cable or taken the power out or neglected to report a fault on the display. Our remote management solutions allow you to manage everything around those displays, so you can proactively get into that meeting room before the next people arrive and rectify the core issue. One of my customers in the retail world has in the region of 200 displays per store and most retail stores don’t have any IT trained staff. They’re all retail experts and product experts. If we can help maintain the uptime of those displays, it gives a better shopping experience for their customers. That can either be done by the reseller or by the customer. We sell the products through our reseller network to the end user, but we’re also seeing more and more reseller partners integrate this remote management solution into their own network operating centres as part of their value-add to their customers. TR: Are you expanding your software offering? Or does Samsung mainly rely on integrations with third party vendors? AH: We’re always looking to see what might come next, but we’re also conscious of the fact that sometimes a partnership is the best way forward. Whilst we’ve developed our own CMS and our own remote management system, we’re also enhancing things through our SSSP programme – the Samsung Smart Signage Platform programme – which allows our partners to develop their applications and offer them out to our display network. SSSP is making it a lot easier for our partners to put their products out there and for our end customers to choose which applications best suit their requirements. ...continued Not all meeting rooms want a large display. Some are quite happy with a 55-inch or even smaller display and LED doesn’t meet that requirement yet – I think it’ll be a few years before it does and even then the cost differential might be a little too much
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