The firm LG, six of its own employees, three of Samsung Display's employees and two others have been charged with the theft of industrial OLED secrets from Samsung.
Naturally, LG has denied any involvement by both itself and its employees, however Samsung took a somewhat more serious tone, "Samsung Mobile Display, which takes up about 97 per cent share in the world's OLED market, is worried about losing tens of trillions of won (billions of pounds) due to the latest technology leak."
The firm went on to state that LG "systematically" stole OLED technology from 2010 to 2011 and poached Samsung employees, "Executives of LG Display, which lacks OLED technology and related human resources, took the lead in this criminal act in order to overcome their shortcomings as quickly as possible," stated Samsung.
LG is now threatening to sue Samsung for defamation, stating that "LG Display's products boast excellent technology and even received a presidential award with the OLED panel for 55-inch screens, we do not need Samsung's technology which works under a totally different display system."
Certainly, from what we've observed at events, LG's OLED screen technology is significantly different from that of Samsung's, with Samsung favouring the direct, individual diode approach, whilst LG has gone for the use of white OLEDs with colour filters, however, there's a lot more involved in the mass-production of OLEDs and there could be something here that isn't apparent on the surface, in fact, just knowing of Samsung's successes and failures when applying different techniques would be a huge time and cost saver.
It seems that only time and a thorough investigation may reveal the truth.
