The Fraunhofer FEP announced new large-area flexible OLED lighting panel prototypes that have been fabricated on ultra-thin glass and encapsulated with a ultra-thin glass foil in the same process.

The new process developed at the Fraunhofer institute is able to deposit OLEDs on the flexible glass and encapsulation it using an additional flexible glass layer - all in a a single roll-to-roll manufacturing step.

During the company's financial conference call, Orbotech said that it has received new optical system bookings for two OLED fabs in two different countries - and it recently delivered a system to a third fab in a third country. The company says that this is a "clear evidence that OLED is increasing its penetration across the industry".

It's interested to hear Orbotech talk about three countries. It's highly likely that the first two countries are Korea and China, but the third country could either be Japan (for JOLED or JDI or perhaps Sharp/Foxconn) or it could be Taiwan (AU Optronics, most likely).

Germany-based OLED emitter developer Cynora announced it has made significant progress in its highly efficient blue OLED emitter material developments during the last 6 months. The company's materials are not yet ready for commercialization, but the company believes it is on its way.

Cynora develops TADF-based emitters, focusing on blue-color emitters. Cynora has developed deep blue material reaching an EQE of 16.3% (at 100 cd/m²) compared to 3% reached in October 2015, a factor 5 improvement in six months.

Samsung Electronics' president and TV chief Kim Hyun-seok said that the company has no immediate plans to make OLED TVs. Kim says that there has been little progress with OLED TVs, and production is still tricky and expensive. In fact, Kim said that "I wouldn’t say OLED is our future direction".

Kim has high hopes for Samsung's Quantum-Dot LCD TV technology, and sees it progressing faster than OLEDs. Samsung claims that its quantum dot TV already outpaces current OLED TVs in terms of picture quality and brightness.

The €11-million 3-years European Flex-o-Fab project was launched in January 2013 with an aim to help commercialize flexible OLEDs. The Holst Centre, the project's coordinator, announced that the Flex-o-Fab successfully completed its goals - including developing indium-free electrodes (based on ZTO with a supporting metal grid) and brighter OLEDs (light emission was enhanced by about 30% using a plastic substrate with outcoupling features).

The project used a distributed pilot production line and associated manufacturing chain involving partners and facilities at different locations across Europe. The project partners managed to migrate key processes from sheet-to-sheet processing to roll-to-roll production. .

UBI Research says that the OLED materials market is set to grow at a CAGR of 46% from 2016 to 2021, to reach $4.3 billion. In 2016 itself OLED emitters will record $677 million - a 16% increase from 2015.

This fast growth will mostly come from AMOLED smartphones and OLED TVs. In 2016 Samsung and LG will buy the majority of those materials (about 94%) - but going forward more producers, especially in China, will join the market.

Samsung's Galaxy TabPro S, announced in January 2016, is now shipping globally for $899. The TabPro S is a Windows 10 convertible hybrid tablet, that features a 12" 2160x1440 AMOLED display, an Intel Core m3 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 128/256 GB SSD drive.

Last week Universal Display celebrates 20 years on the NASDAQ, and the company's executives rang the opening bell to signal the beginning of trading on April 20. This is a nice recognition of UDC's achievements over the years.

In 2015, UDC reported 191 million in revenues - and generated $113.6 million in cash.

A China-based company (maybe called Interim, it's not clear) has demonstrated a new fully-bendable smartphone. The company claims that this smartphone has a "graphene-based screen", 5.2" in size.

It's not clear what the meaning of a "graphene-based" display is, in this case. While graphene can theoretically be used to make light emitting devices, it's highly unlikely that this is the case here. My guess would be that this is a flexible OLED display (could also be a flexible LCD, but that's unlikely) with a graphene-based touch panel.