By Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang
SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korea’s LG Display Co Ltd posted on Wednesday a 30% drop in quarterly operating profit on the year, hit by a steep decline in TV panel prices that offset solid shipments of smaller screens used for computers, laptops and smartphones.
The Apple Inc supplier posted an operating profit of 476 billion won ($397.64 million) for the October-December period, down from 678 billion a year earlier.
It missed an average analyst forecast of 588 billion won compiled by Refinitiv SmartEstimate.
Revenue rose 18% on year to 8.8 trillion won.
During October-December, prices of 55-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) panels for TV sets fell 37% from the previous quarter, according to market data from TrendForce’s WitsView.
However, LG Display managed to avoid a bigger dent to profits, analysts said, as only 27% of sales came from television panels during the quarter.
Solid shipments of LCD panels for notebooks and monitors, whose prices declined by less than LCD TV panel prices, as well as higher-margin OLED panels for smartphones and TVs, should help LG defend its results this year, analysts said.
Shares of LG Display ended down 0.7%, versus the wider market’s 0.4% fall.
(Reporting by Joyce Lee & Heekyong Yang; Editing by Clarence Fernandez & Simon Cameron-Moore)
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