LEDinside, a research division of Trendforce Corp., has made the latest price trend report, pointing out that the LED price for backlight application remained stable in Q2 due to a robust demand and shortage of upstream materials. It predicts that there should be limited pressure to lower the price in Q3 as the supply of LED materials gradually stabilizes and large-size backlight application demand continues. However, high power LEDs for lighting application are expected to receive higher pressure to cut prices than LEDs for backlight application since major manufacturers are expanding their production.

LEDinside says that although the LED price drops by 5%-10% every quarter, it is not the same in Q2 this year. Because of high season demand as well as ongoing expansion of large-size panel applications such as the LED backlit TV, the LED backlight application tightened the supply and caused a strain on the existing tight supply of upstream materials like the sapphire substrate, MO gas, further enlarging the supply-demand gap.

In terms of LEDs for small and medium size panel applications, which include 0.4t&0.6t for mobile application, 0.8&3014 for notebook application, the price unprecedentedly got rid of the seasonal erosion pressure and remained flat with unit price between 0.04 USD and 0.1 USD. However, the price of 5630 for the large-size panel application slightly slipped 3% out of strategic consideration on the side of manufacturers, unit price in the range of 0.13~0.2 USD.

LED prices in Q2 this year were more stable than ever. Particularly, in view of the LED for light application, the price kept relatively flat, down no more than 3% as a result of the robust market demand and tight supply. With regard to the lighting application, LED prices reflected higher pressures to decline and fell by around 12%.

Regarding the high power LEDs for lighting application in Q2, with a positive market outlook, the price dropped under the impact of investment increase and production expansion. The price of the mainstream 100lm/W product plunged about 12% in this quarter, which is more than the price drop of general LED products for backlight application.