In January 2017 Novaled started constructing its new fab and office buildings in Dresden, that will comprise of a renovated old mill that will be turned into a prestigious office building and a new 110-meter long R&D plant with state-of-the-art research areas, laboratories and clean rooms. Today Novaled celebrates the corner stone foundation for the new company premises.

Samsung's decision to invest over €25 in the property purchase and construction shows the Korean OLED developer commitment to Novaled. The site's total space will be 10,200 m² - the old mill, which is under monument protection, will be renovated and transformed into a prestigious office building. and a 110 meter long new R&D plant will be built - and it will include research area, clean rooms and new laboratories.

According to the Nikkei Asian Review, Japan-based OLED material maker Idemitsu Kosan plans to expand its production of OLED materials by 70% by March 2019 (end of Fiscal Year 2018). Its Korean subsidiary Idemitsu Electronic Materials Korea will increase annual production by 60% to 8 tons (this was already announced last year) while it's Shizuoka plant will double its capacity to 4 tons.

The Asian Review says that Idemitsu and Merck together hold a market share of about 70%-80% from all OLED material sales. Idemitsu generated around $135 million in revenues from OLED materials in 2016, with a high profit margin.

Last month JOLED announced that it started to sample 21.6" 4K OLED monitors. JOLED plans to develop these OLED monitors for medical applications - it will produce these in low volume at its current 4.5-Gen pilot production line, and will start mass production in 2019.

JOLED's CEO, Nobuhiro Higashiiriki, said in a conference that these first samples were shipped to Sony, which may become JOLED's first customer. JOLED says that the company managed to achieve a high quality and long lifetime, which was a challenge due to the printing process used.

Hyperfluoresence TADF materials developer Kyulux announced that Dr. Chris Brown will join the company as VP of Products. Dr. Brown will lead Kyulux's product development and delivery efforts ahead of the company's anticipated first commercial deployments of TADF and Hyperfluorescence materials in the coming year.

Dr. Brown joins Kyulux from OLED inkjet equipment maker Kateeva, where he was Vice President of Process Engineering. Dr. Brown has been granted 31 US patents and has 34 publications.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Dow Chemical Company have chosen a bottom-up approach to patterning emissive polymers, aiming to solve some of the problems that plague Solution-based protocols for OLED manufacture.

The team started with a layer of indium tin oxide and used light-activated chemistry to pinpoint specific locations on the surface for polymer growth. Key to the success of this approach are designer iridium photocatalysts that serve two roles: First, as the catalyst to build the emissive brush polymers, and then as a necessary dopant for the resulting OLED arrays.

In February 2017 BOE Display announced that will establish a new R&D OLED TV production line in Hefei. According to Digitimes, BOE Display is intending to use an inkjet printing process in this line, and the company already placed an order for an inkjet deposition system from Kateeva last month. BOE will use the systems to produce 55" OLED TVs.

In February BOE announced that the new line will cost 1 billion CNY (around $145 million USD). BOE will invest 80% of the funds, with the rest provided by the Hefei government. Digitimes now states that the new line will only cost 600 million CNY - so it may be that the inkjet printing line is an addition to the 1 billion CNY line (which in that case, will probably be based on an evaporation process).

ETNews reports that Samsung Display is expected to initiate flexible OLED production for Apple's first OLED iPhone later this month. Apple recently approved the prototype panels, and Samsung is getting ready to increase its production rate.

SDC will ship over 10 million flexible OLEDs to Apple every month, as Apple ordered over 80 million OLEDs for 2017 alone. According to ETNews, Apple will not bend the flexible OLED - the iPhone's display will be flat.

China-based EverDisplay demonstrated several new AMOLED prototype displays at CES Asia 2017. First up are the company's latest flexible OLEDs which are 5.5" in size with a FHD (1920x1080, 402 PPI) resolution and a curvature radius of 20 mm. The whole panel si just 0.3 mm in thickness.

EverDisplay is also showing the same panels in an edge-type mobile phone configuration. Everdisplay shows how its displays can be used to create phones that are almost completely (91%) covered with a display.

Lenovo introduced its X1 Yoga 2017 laptop in early 2017 - and the hybrid tablet / laptop has a 14" 2560 x 1440 display - either an LCD or an OLED. The X1 Yoga 2017 is now shipping - and the OLED version with a 256GB SSD, 8GB of RAM and an intel Core i7 CPU costs $2349.

OLEDON announced that it has developed a plane-source evaporation shadow mask process that can achieve a shadow distance of 0.38um - which can enable OLED display resolution to reach 2,250 PPI. The company says it technology will be able to achieve 3,300 PPI in the future.

OLEDON is not alone in the development of plane-source evaporation technology. In November 2016 Sunic Systems announced that it developed a similar AMOLED production process - that can also achieve 2,250 PPI. It may be that Sunic and OLEDON are collaborating on this, it is not clear.