July 2016

A few days ago Xiaomi launched a new entry-level smartphone, the Redmi Pro - with a 5.5" FHD AMOLED display. According to a report from China, that AMOLED is produced by two Chinese display makers - EverDisplay (the main supplier) and BOE Display.

Everdisplay (EDO) started mass producing 5" 720p AMOLED displays towards the end of 2014. Since then the company seems to be accelerating its OLED program, and is now offering several displays - including indeed a 5.5" one (EDO also produces and develops smaller AMOLEDs for wearables and larger ones for the automobile market).

Photonics-based solutions provider Coherent reported its financial results for CYQ2 2016. Coherent received over $240 million in flat-panel display related orders, including a single order for systems in excess of $100 million. Most of these FPD orders are tied to flexible OLED production.

Coherent also said it starts to see orders for other process steps in OLED production, including Short-Pulse Lasers for film cutting and excimer lasers for Laser-Lift-Off.

Taiwan's AU Optronics reported its financial results for Q2 2016. The display maker says that it saw strong demand for displays, including TV displays and the average panel price bottomed up in the quarter - and started to pick up. Revenues reached $2.5 billion and gross profit reached $175 million.

AUO's experienced growth in both OLED client number and projects number. The company expects to ship over a million OLED panels in Q3 2016. AUO is focused on OLED for VR application and the company produces 3.8" (1080x1200) and 5.5" VR OLEDs, reaching a high 420 PPI. AUO also develops OLED displays with higher resolution - larger than 600 PPI, aiming to bring this into mass production as soon as possible.

In January 2016 Lenovo announced its first OLED laptop-tablet hybrid, the X1 Yoga. The OLED model is finally shipping, starting at $1,400.

The X1 Yoga has a 14" 2550x1440 display (LCD or OLED) and the configuration goes up to Core i7 CPUs, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage. The laptop weighs 1.27 Kg.

Samsung Electronics reported good Q2 2016 earning results - revenues reached $45 billion and operating profit was $7.17 billion, highest since Q1 2014. Samsung saw excellent mobile phone sales - mostly from its high-end Galaxy S7 and S7 edge phones. The component (semiconductor and displays) profits were lower than last year, but slightly better than Q1 2016.

The Display segmented improved over the last quarter - led by increased OLED capacity utilization. SDC sees the stable earnings for OLEDs ahead, and the company said that the capital expenditure will be slightly higher in 2016 compared to 2015, and most of it will concentrate on OLED and V-NAND capacity as the company sees high demand for these components.

ALD equipment maker Encapsulix developed a new ALD system (the Infinity 200) that is optimized for deposition on 200 mm substrates - for both R&D or manufacturing systems. The new system offers several advanced features especially suited for thin-film low-temperature encapsulation deposition on flexible substrates, particular for OLED displays.

Encapsulix announced that the new system was successfully installed and qualified for ultrafast OLED encapsulation at Leti, the CEA Tech research institute in Grenoble, France. Additional systems will be delivered in the next 12 months to customers in Asia.

Samsung Display announced its 55" mirror and transparent OLED displays back in June 2015, and later announced that it will start shipping those displays in Q2 2016. In May the company announced its first customer (a hair salon in Seoul) - but said that shipments to other customers will only begin in Q3 2016.

TechRadar today claims that Samsung decided not to produce these transparent displays after all, because there was not enough demand to justify the investment. This is not confirmed yet, but it may be that Samsung could not make these displays at attractive enough prices due to low yields and high production costs.

LG Display announced today that it will construct a new 6-Gen (1500x1850 mm) flexible OLED production line in Paju, South Korea. The investment in the new E6 line will total $1.7 billion USD.

The E6 line will have a monthly capacity of 15,000 G6 substrates, and is scheduled to begin production in the second half of 2018.

We are quite used to the fact that all reviews and tests to show that OLED TVs outperform the best LCD and Plasma TVs, but in a recent HDR shootout in the UK, LCD TVs actually were favored by the audience.

The UK HDTVTestweb site pitched several LCD TVs against LG'd 65" OLED65E6 TV. The TV that got the most votes was Samsung's UE65KS9500 (UN6KS9800 in the US), and the runner up was Panasonic's TX-65DX902 (65DX900 in the US). The shootout used several HDR clips.

Last week IHS said that OLED display penetration rate in mobile phones will grow from 13% in 2015 to 34% in 2021, mostly due to the adoption of OLEDs by China-based phone makers (I would assume Apple's OLED iPhones will also help).

IHS now releases some more details on their mobile OLED market forecast. IHS says that mobile OLED shipments, which totaled 257 million panels in 2015 will almost double by 2017 - to reach 455 million units. Shipments in 2016 will reach 367 million panels.