OLED microdisplay maker eMagin reports its financial results for Q2 2016. This was a financially challenging quarter for eMagin, but the company says it is excited about its progress on opportunities in the commercial and consumer markets. Revenues were $5.5 million (down 21% compared to Q2 2015 - mostly due to lower volumes and manufacturing issues that has been resolved). Net loss was $2.2 million (up from $66,000 in Q2 2015).

eMagin XGA096 OLED-XL

At the end of the quarter, eMagin had $6.1 million in cash and equivalents (down from $9.3 million at the end of 2015). The company increased its R&D investments and began to build inventory as it expects to launch two consumer products later this year (more on these below). eMagin expanded its active customer count by 11% since the beginning of 2016 - and it currently has 108 active customers.

Samsung announced its Galaxy note 7 last week, and our friend Raymond Soneira from Display Mate has published a comprehensive review of the Note 7 display. The Note 7 has a 5.7" 2560x1440 (518 ppi) flexible Super AMOLED dual-edge display - which DisplayMate says is the best performing mobile display ever tested.

This is hardly a surprise - Samsung's OLED displays have been advancing at a very fast rate, and have surpassed the best LCDs on all parameters (except price, that is). Displaymate says that the major display enhancements introduced in the Note 7 include a new wider color gamut and new HDR mode specifically for 4K videos and a record peak brightness of over 1,000 nits.

Samsung has been developing foldable OLEDs for a long time, and several reports in the past few months suggested that Samsung is working on a foldable phone (or maybe two?), to be released in 2017.

Foldable OLED concept (2013)

The so-called Project Valley is still under development at Samsung. Samsung Electronics Mobile Communications Business President Koh Dong-jin says that Samsung aims indeed to roll out foldable smartphones in the future - but the company "needs more time" to actually bring this to market. Interestingly he said that the major challenges are in the software and user interface - perhaps the development of the foldable OLED display itself is nearing completion.

Researchers from Harvard University, MIT and Samsung developed a large-scale computer-driven material screening process that incorporates theoretical and experimental chemistry, machine learning and cheminformatics, with an aim to quickly identify new OLED molecules.

The so-called Molecular Space Shuttle system was used to design more than 1,000 new high-performance blue-light emitting molecules. It seems that there is still a lot of work ahead to find the best new candidates and actually test these molecules, but this may be a promising new direction in OLED molecule research.

UBI Research says that the OLED lighting market will grow rapidly in the near future (a CAGR of 66% in 2017-2025) to reach $1.6 billion in sales by 2020. LG Display will lead the market with a market share of 53% (in terms of revenue).

UBI estimates the OLED lighting market in 2016 at $114 million, and LGD's current market share is 15% (or $17 million in sales).

OLED microdisplay maker eMagin developed a 2K x 2K OLED microdisplay based VR HMD, which is now being offered to partners (the company's first licensee is probably ODG). The company is also developing its next-gen 4K OLED microdisplays.

Reaching out to first-tier customers means that eMagin will need to produce a massive amount of microdisplays at a relatively low cost - which it cannot do with its current production equipment and capacity. The company will upgrade its production fab, but that won't be enough and eMagin already stated that it is in talks with potential foundry partners.

In January 2016, LG Display's Vice-Chairman said that the company's goal is to ship 1 million OLED TV panels in 2016 and 1.5 million in 2017. In 2015, LGD shipped around 400,000 OLED panels.

According to a new report from Korea, LG was recently able to increase the production yields at its OLED TV fab, and is increasing its production target to 1.7 million panels in 2017. As we've seen in the past, the product mix (between 55" and 65" panels) has a major effect on the number of panels LG actually produces - when more consumer prefer 65" panels, LG can make a smaller amount of panels in total.

Universal Display signed a five-year OLED Technology License Agreement and Supplemental Material Purchase Agreement with Tianma Micro-electronics. Under the license agreement, UDC granted Tianma non-exclusive license rights to manufacture and sell OLED display products based on its IPs. UDC will also supply phosphorescent OLED materials to Tianma.

Tianma is currently producing AMOLED displays in low volume in its 5.5-Gen pilot fab in Shanghai (our own sources say that these displays are not commercial yet but will be so by the end of 2016). In May 2016 the company demonstrated flexible and rigid OLED prototypes, including a 5.5" 702p (270 PPI) flexible OLED prototype with a bending radius of 20 mm.

Digitimes reports that mobile phone maker Oppo may not reach its goal of shipping 90-100 million mobile phones in 2016. Digitimes says that Samsung Display cannot supply enough AMOLED displays to Oppo as SDC's production capacity is fully booked.

Oppo R7

According to Digitimes, Oppo originally aimed to ship 60 million phones in 2016, but later increased its aim to 90-100 million. I guess Oppo reached out to SDC asking for more AMOLED displays, but SDC already committed its capacity to other phone makers (in China and elsewhere).

MagnaChip reported its financial results for Q2 2016, and the company says that there is a very strong demand for AMOLED drivers. AMOLED IC revenue jumped 73% from Q2 to Q1 - and over three fold compared to Q2 2015. AMOLED IC now accounts for 65% of MagnaChip's display solutions business.

MagnaChip explains that this growth mostly comes from the "wave" of smartphone makers in China that started to adopt AMOLED displays in their mobile phones. MagnaChip's ICs were designed into 29 smartphone models, and MagnaChip believes it is the world's second largest supplier of AMLED ICs.