On August 31, 2011, Sony, Toshiba, and Hitachi agreed to the merger of their respective small and medium-sized LCD business units, supported by an investment of two hundred billion yen from INCJ. Soon after, INCJ and Panasonic also began talks on the acquisition of one of Panasonic's factories. JDI has started its operation on April 1, 2012 after it had finalized the agreement between the stakeholders on November 15, 2011. In April 2013, Japan Display West, Japan Display Central, and Japan Display East were merged. In October, Taiwan Diskplay Inc was established. On March 19, 2014, the company was listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Therefore broader financial information has become available. JDI has accumulated consecutive losses since its IPO. A restructuring plan was announced in 2017, including closing down a production line in Japan and the layoff of approx. a third of its workforce. A newly-created entity INCJ, Ltd. had become the major shareholder of Japan Display with 25,29 % of total shareholdings since September 21, 2018 as a result of a corporate split of the old INCJ. From 2019 onwards, the company began to actively seek further investment as the financial difficulties worsened. It signed a memorandum of understanding to sell 49.82% of the company to Suwa Investment Holdings LLC at a sale price of US$715 million. Suwa was the name of a group of investors, which included the Chinese Silk Road Fund and Harvest Tech Investment Management, Taiwan’s TPK Holdings, and Fubon Financial Holdings. On June 12, 2019, JDI disclosed that major changes are to be implemented due to sluggish sales in the Mobile Business Division. It announced one plant would be closed and another suspended operation. A major reduction of the workforce is also planned. On June 27, $100 million investment was announced by Apple, boosting the stock price of JDI by 32% at the time. On December 13, the company agreed to an US$800 million bailout. On December 26, it entered talks to sell its factory in Hakusan City, Ishikawa prefecture to Sharp Corporation for 80 to 90 billion yen. The factory was partly financed by Apple, which provided US$800 million in funding. It was built in 2015 and began operations in 2016 at a cost of US$1.5 billion, and has been partly idle since June 2019, due to Apple's adoption of OLED displays. In Feburary 2020, Ichigo Asset management, a multinational private investment fund, gained control of the company in exchange for US$715 million in funding. The memorandum signed the year before with Suwa was terminated. INCJ and other existing shareholders retained a stake in the company. Being under financial trouble due to its late decision to manufacture OLED displays and an approximately US$800 million loan from Apple, the company's OLED division, JOLED, has not yet been able to compete with other manufacturers, whilst more than half of JDI's revenue still came from the shrinking IPS LCD panel sales to Apple. In April 2020, Japan Display began to sell LCD production equipment valued at US$200 million to Apple, with plans to sell the factory's real estate to Sharp. This will allow JDI to focus on its remaining product demand and factories. In July 2020, the CEO of JDI revealed the company's plan to start mass production of OLED display panels "as early as 2022" with a novel manufacturing technology.
Technology
JDI has developed several technologies to differentiate its LCD panels from those of its competitors.
Active-matrix displays driven by TFTs based on a low-temperature polycrystalline-silicon process instead of amorphous silicon. These higher performance transistors allow a higher resolution.
Most LCDs manufactured by JDI use the In-Plane-Switching concept, as do many of its competitors. JDI has developed an improvement for darker black pixels, called "IPS-NEO", which reduces the light shining through from the backlighting.
The conventional combination of a transparent touch-screen device in front of an LCD panel has been replaced by integrating the touch-screen function into the LCD panel itself, called "Pixel Eyes".
For reflective LCDs without backlighting, JDI has developed an addressing technique using a thin-film memory device SRAM in addition to the conventional TFT for each pixel, so that a still image can be stored utilizing a small amount of energy.
