EverDisplay Optronics - Page 5

Universal Display announced that China-based AMOLED producer Everdisplay (EDO) has signed an OLED evaluation agreement. As per the agreement, UDC will supply EDO with phosphorescent OLED materials to be used in EDO's displays.

Everdisplay actually started mass producing AMOLED displays towards the end of 2014 in a 4.5-Gen line with a monthly capacity of 20,000 substrates. The company is currently producing both small AMOLEDs for wearable devices and larger smartphone displays. EDO is also developing flexible OLEDs, transparent OLEDs and OLEDs for VR and automotive applications. EDO's current OLED displays can be found in the OLED Marketplace.

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.

Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) released some very interesting information regarding the mobile OLED market from its recent OLED market report by Yoshio Tamura and Ross Young. DSCC expects mobile AMOLED demand to grow from almost 400 million panels in 2016 to almost 1.2 billion in 2021.

Samsung Electronics, who's already using AMOLED displays in almost 80% of its smartphones will not increase its AMOLED orders by a lot, but shipments will grow dramatically to other players led by Apple, Huawei and Oppo.

According to Digitimes Research, OLED display makers in China will increase their total annual capacity from 272,000 m² in 2016 to 7.86 million m² in 2020 - a CAGR or 131.9%.

The largest producer in 2020 will be BOE Display (35% of the Chinese OLED market), followed by Tianma (17.6%), Visionox (14%), Everdisplay (11.6%), CSoT (9.5%), Truly (7.8%) and Royole (4.5%).

We spent last week visiting China - mostly around Shanghai. We attended the Printed & Flexible Electronics China 2017 conference, visited both EverDisplay and Visionox to learn more about their OLED products and plans, and also went to Wuxi to see the interesting and quite impressive graphene center over there.

Samsung Display and LG Display are the clear leaders in AMOLED production - for almost 10 years now. But the market is now changing as several new players, mostly in China, are starting to commercially produce AMOLED displays - mostly for mobile phones, wearables and VR headsets.

IHS says that combine OLED shipments from all active Chinese OLED makers reached over a 1.4 million panels in Q3 2016 . This is still small relative to Samsung's capacity (which made around 70 million panels in the quarter) but a step forward for these companies.

IHS says that strong demand from Chinese smartphone brands (see chart above), mostly Oppo and Vivo boosted the demand for AMOLED displays. Coupled with the reported supply shortage at SDC this created an opportunity for the new OLED makers based in China. In Q2 2016 these Chinese OLED makers produced around 600,000 panels (so production more than doubled in the quarter.

A few months ago we reported that China-based AMOLED producer Everdisplay is planning to invest $4.1 billion USD to build a 6-Gen AMOLED factory. Today the company launched this new AMOLED fab officially in a ceremony in Shanghai, China.

On December 9th Everdisplay started constructing the new fab in the Jinshan Industrial Zone in Shanghai. Investment in the new fab, according to EverDisplay, will actually be 27.2 billion yuan - or almost $4 billion USD. The fab will be able to produce 30,000 monthly substrates (1500 x 1850 mm) and will be used to produce small and medium sized flexible AMOLEDs (1 to 15 inch).

When Samsung started producing AMOLED displays in 2007, AMOLED technology was at a very early stage, immature, and Samsung took a huge risk. A few years later, this risk was rewarded with a successful display business and a boost to the company's smartphone business that was the first to adopt AMOLED displays.

Fast forward to 2016, and today Samsung is still the king of AMOLED displays, with a market share of over 95% in small/medium AMOLED panels. If we look at OLED TV production, then LG Display is the only commercial producer at this stage. But Samsung and LG are not alone - several companies in China and Taiwan already started mass producing AMOLEDs, and others have announced plans for large AMOLED fabs. In this long article we'll list all of these AMOLED producers and developers (over a dozen) - and details their current production capacity and rumored and confirmed production plans.

According to Digitimes, China-based AMOLED producer Everdisplay is planning to invest $4.1 billion USD to build a 6-Gen AMOLED factory. The upcoming factory will have a monthly capacity of 30,000 substrates and will start trial production in 2018.

Mass production in the new fab is expected by early 2019 - and will include panels from 1 to 13 inches. It is not mentioned in the report whether these are regular glass-based AMOLEDs or flexible ones.

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).