eMagin reported their Q2 2012 results with record revenues of $8.6 million (a 15.3% increase over Q2 2011). Net income was $577,000. eMagin has about $13.3 million in cash. During Q2 the company bought back 125,000 shares (average price $2.95).
New deposition machine
Andrew Sculley (eMagin's CEO) says that eMagin have finally started to produce microdisplays on their new deposition machine. The machine isn't yet fully optimized, and they are also producing on their older Satella machine. eMagin says that once the new machine is fully optimized (they need to automate a certain process still), capacity will grow 10-fold, and the displays will have better uniformity - which will increase quality and yields.
Direct-Emission
As we reported from SID, eMagin is moving forward with their direct-emission (or direct patterning as they call it) OLED microdisplays. All OLED microdisplays on the market (including Sony, MicroOLED and eMagin ones) currently use white OLEDs with color filters and direct patterning will increase the efficiency (or brightness) by a factor of four to five.
Direct-Emission will also enable eMagin to lower the pixel size. They have demonstrated 8.1 micron pixels (full-color), which they say it's the smallest one to date.
Consumer camera EVF
We reported from SID about eMagin's XGA microdisplays for consumer cameras electronic viewfiners (EVF). They are now reporting that they are on track to complete the development and start shipping samples by the end of the month to a "potentially large customer".
At SID, I estimated that the potential customers for eMagin's microdisplays are Panasonic, Samsung, Olympus or Pentax. Andrew now specifically mentions Olympus, a big Korean company (Samsung probably), Recoh (Pentax) and Fujifilm. It seems to me that the customer is either Olympus or Fuji. Andrew says that a specific camera model in that range they are talking about might have 100,000 to 200,000 units sold in a year. That's a very high volume for eMagin, and probably explains why the need that 10-fold increase in capacity from the new machine.
Competition
eMagin has three major competitors in the OLED microdisplays market: Sony, MicroOLED and Olightek. Andrew says that Sony are currently supplying OLEDs to their own devices only (but this may change in the future), and it seems that the brightness of these displays are quite limited.
Regarding MicroOLED and Olightek, he said that they haven't seen many of their displays anywhere. It seems that Olightek has better funding then MicroOLED (from the Chinese government).
Augmented reality applications
eMagin says that they have one "very high-end customer" that is working on an augmented reality (AR) application. From what I understand this is a Japanese customer. They are in talks with several more companies that plan such devices, but currently only one customer.
Outlook
The company says that they captured the highest level of new business bookings ever, which drove their backlog to new highs ($19.8 million). The revenue forecast for 2012 remains the same at $30-$34 million.
Disclosure: I'm personally holding shares in eMagin.
