Today we're launching a new post series: personal OLED interviews. Each one will feature an industry professional - we hope this is going to be a fun opportunity to get to know the people behind OLEDs a bit better. If you wish to be featured, contact us here. This first post will be about our very own Ron Mertens, just to get the ball rolling.

Ron Mertens, OLED-Info's editor-in-chief

What was the last book you read? Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. A (long) tale of an Australian outlaw that escaped to India.

The OLED-Info team is excited to announce its attendance in the LOPEC 2015 conference, March 3-5, Messe Munchen, Germany. LOPEC (large-area, organic & printed electronics convention) is a leading international exhibition and conference for the printed electronics industry. LOPEC will host international market leaders aiming to present innovations, latest materials and groundbreaking processes to all walks of industry folk.

If you wish to schedule a meeting with us, contact us here. Until then, enjoy this LOPEC video:

LG Display's CEO, Han Sang-Beom, says that LG expects to ship 600,000 OLED panels in 2015 and 1.5 million in 2016. The company wants to be the OLED leaders, and Han says they expect competition soon from Chinese, Korean and Japanese makers (he specifically mentions JOLED) but LG aims to lead from the start in this market.

LG Display says that the global high-end TV market is estimated at about 4 million sets, which means they actually aim to capture a 37.5% market share. This also means that even in 2016, LG sees OLEDs remaining in the "high-end" segment.

BMW is demonstrating a new concept car, the M4 Concept Iconic Lights with two new lighting technologies - the laserlight headlights and the OLED based tail lights and rear direction indicators. BMW is using many small thin OLEDs to create a 3D effect.

BMW says that they will launch a production model with OLEDs in the "near future". In April 2014 BMW said that the future lighting technology for their automobiles will be OLED, and that BMW expects to start selling cars with OLED lighting within 3 years.

JOLED (Japan OLED) was launched in August 2014 by Japan Display, Sony and Panasonic with an aim to become an OLED medium display producer (focusing at first on OLEDs for tables, laptops and signage). Today the company was finally officially established and began operating.

According to reports from Japan, JOLED is headed by Orbotech Japan former president, and employs around 260 people. JOLED is owned by INCJ (75%), Japan Display (15%), Sony (5%) and Panasonic (5%). The company's current plan is to focus on 10-20 inch OLEDs and to begin pilot production in H2 2016 and mass production in 2H 2017. JOLED will mainly target laptops and tablets. It will great to finally get an OLED laptop, but hopefully we won't have to wait till 2017...

In the past couple of years, several reports claimed that China's Hon Hai Precision Industry, or Foxconn, is starting to develop OLED displays, with the latest one being a rather confusing one about an 8.5-Gen LTPS fab in Taiwan.

An article from Japan now says that Foxconn is developing 5" flexible OLED displays, with first samples shipping by 2016, and limited low-scale production slated for 2016 as well. Foxconn is one of Apple's major suppliers.

LG finally officially announced their new curved OLED phone, the G Flex 2. This exciting new phone has a 5.5" Full-HD Flexible OLED on a plastic substrate, protected with a new glass cover developed by LG that is reportedly 20% stronger than the latest Gorilla Glass 3. The screen curves from top to bottom, with a curvature radius of 700 mm. The whole phone can be slightly bent.

The G Flex 2 has self-healing back coating, a Snapdragon 810 Octacore 2Ghz CPU, 2GB of RAM, LTE, 16/32 GB of storage, 13 MP camera, fast-charging battery and Android 5.0 Lollipop. The phone will be released in Korea by the end of January for $740, and AT&T will carry it in the US.

LG Electronics announced six new OLED TVs - including some curved TVs, some flat ones - and also the world's first bendable TV. All of LG's new TVs use 4K resolution. LG Display says that LG is committed to the "superior qualities of OLED" and sees 2015 as the breakout year for OLED TVs.

So the most interesting TV is probably the EG9900, which features a 77" 4K OLED panel that can be switched from a flat state to a curved one. It uses a newly developed anti-glare filter and is powered by a ten-core processor (!). LG did not disclose the price and release date of this TV. But it'll probably be very expensive as the company's fixed curved 77" 4K OLED was priced at $29,999 in 2014.

BMW announced that it is going to showcase new OLED lighting technologies at CES 2015 next week, and the German automaker plans to unveil its "BMW Organic Light" taillight concepts.

BMW Vision Future Luxury

In May 2014, BMW unveiled their BMW Vision Future Luxury design concept, which used several new display intefaces and OLED taillights. It's likely that the new concept on display next week will have an updated design or panels. The OLED supplier to the Vision Future Luxury is Astron Fiamm (owners of the Blackbody consumer OLED brand).

LG Display announced that it is going to unveil new slim LED LCD prototype TVs at CES 2015. LGD will show 55" and 65" "Art Slim" LCDs that are 7.5 mm (55") and 8.2 mm deep - which means LG managed to reduce their LCD depth by 75% (they also reduced the weight by 25%).

This means that these new LCDs rival the thickness of LG's OLEDs which are about 4.5 mm thick (apart for the connector box which is a lot thicker). OLEDs can be a lot thinner of course (Sony for example showed a 0.3 mm 11" OLED panel prototype back in 2008), but LG's new slim TVs show again how difficult it is to compete with the combatant LCD technology.