What the new year holds for displays

2019 was a very good year for Anders, and we hope it was good for you as well. As the earth spins to 2020, we’d like to pause a moment to reflect on 2019 and look forward to 2020.

This past year featured some highlights for us at Anders, including:

• Welcoming new customers working with our Embedded Design Project Team on solution-based projects, encompassing Display, CPU, Carrier and Motherboard designs and bespoke I/O boards for our PC products.
• Working with existing customers to re-design existing mono-based products for next generation, TFT and OLED based integrated solutions, combining touch display, embedded motherboard, custom coverlens, cables and enclosure design.

Even though this year was challenging for our industry, we still grew revenue and were able to increase our engineering team, bringing in two new applications engineers and a quality engineer, strengthening our commitment to our customers to deliver customised solutions.

Whilst 2019 was positive for Anders, there are always challenges, and they’re always important to review, even if we’ve seen them before, because of course that’s how we improve. This past year, some of our challenges were:

• Economic and political conditions have left uncertainty in the market
• We are seeing more competition throughout Europe
• The projects we are working on are more sophisticated and have increasingly lengthening design windows.
• Some of our customers also see uncertainty in their own markets, due to similar scenarios we are seeing, therefore they are less clear about future demands
• We have seen mergers and acquisitions within our customer base and competitors, leading to changes in the landscape

The industry in general has some trends and troubles, such as:

• Companies claiming to know the Display business, but not really being able to support the technology locally to customers, especially in real-world conditions.
• Large corporations and multiline distributors don’t have the depth of support or knowledge locally. Although some are employing more staff in Europe, it’s still a catch-all scenario looking for the easiest, most generic display to provide without considering the application, which leads to problems for the customer down the line.
• Companies coming into Europe are being forced here by the current trade disputes, and their business model will change again if the disputes are solved, so we urge customers to be wary of new entries in our market – they could leave just as quickly when the trade winds shift.
• Large companies are governed by their large customers and key markets and so can make it a strange fit in Europe, which is much more niche.

What does 2020 hold for displays at Anders?

Technology! It brings new placements for Display. The opportunities for display and embedded solutions continue to grow, from products adopting displays for the first time, transitions from mono to colour, LCD to TFT, TN to IPS, and more.

In the non-consumer world, lifetime, viewing angles, operating and stand-by temperature are key. So those generic, consumer-oriented products don’t meet this brief - but Anders and our manufacturing partners do.

We’re also looking forward to expanding our product roadmaps to include E-Ink products, as well as delivering the first samples of Quantum Dot TFT to the non-consumer marketplace.

Anders will continue the process of shifting our identity to that of an enabler. We love to empower product design, optimise the display choice, manage the driving and computing electronics, write the code for it all to work and wrap it up in an enclosure if needed.

We’re a manufacturer, design consultant, design partner and logistics specialist and we want to enable and help more people. We’re excited about 2020 and what it will bring.

Our aim will continue to be the partner of choice for integrated display solutions, which we will achieve as we enable our customers to succeed in their chosen market through our design and supply chain excellence, putting our customer into the centre of our business at all times. And, with this in mind, we’d like to share with you a short video that we’ve recently put together with our strategic customer DataINFOMOBILITY, showcasing through the voice of our customer the reality of approaching Anders with a market need, the solution presented, and the collaborative engineering-to-engineering mind approach taken - we hope you enjoy!

Get in touch to kick start your New Year Display Projects with Anders!