Novaled - Page 6

Novaled announced today that Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC) became a shareholder in Novaled. We do not know the financial details of this deal, but this is obviously a strategic investment for Samsung (who uses Novaled's materials in their AMOLED panels). This is great news for the company (which is a long time sponsor of OLED-Info).

Novaled's latest financing round was in January 2009 (they raised $11.2 million back then). The company says that their 2010 revenue were €11.2 million - and this will probably double or more in 2011, following Samsung's capacity expansion and new 5.5-Gen fab. Back in March 2011 Ecosummit posted a couple of interesting Interviews - one with Novaled's CFO and the other with the company's Chief Scientist. Here's the CFO interview, which discusses their financial situation, technology and markets:

Novaled announced it has developed a highly power-efficient white OLED structure achieving 60 lm/W at a brightness of 1,000 cd/m² capable of reaching 100,000 hours lifetime (at an initial brightness of 1,000 cd/m²). The new OLED uses red and green phosphorescent materials and a commercially available fluorescent blue material.

Novaled says that a fluorescent blue emitter usually results in much less efficient devices, but their PIN OLED technology and proprietary materials resulted in this highly efficient device. Using this fluorescent materiel has several advantages - good device stability, higher lifetime and it is commercially available. It also enables a broad coverage of the complete visible color range.

Future now produced a nice video about The Fraunhofer IPMS OLED program. The video features sample lamps, OLED production and testing equipment, Tabola lighting panels and even a short visit to Novaled. Professor Karl Leo (the IPMS director) is interviewed throughout the video. It's a nice introduction to OLED lighting:

Universal Display (UDC) were speaking in the SID 2011 investor forum. They have recently raised $250 million, and when asked about their plans for this cash, the speaker said that they will be looking at IP acquisition - especially at doing more material layers.

This has been speculated before, but it's very interesting to hear it directly from UDC. Two possible targets for acquisition are Novaled (which indeed develops and sells non-emissive layer OLED materials) and Plextronics. It is also possible that UDC will purchase patents or technology and not an entire company (as they did in March 2011, buying 74 patents from Motorola).

Novaled announced that it has developed a new efficient (36 lm/W) fluorescent white OLED, which the company claims is the world's most power efficient white OLED structure. Novaled used their own proprietary organic materials and a new flat light outcoupling method of extraction and achieved an increase in light emission by more than 80%, with good color rendering. Novaled's new structure also has an improved light angular dependence.

Here's more technical info from Novaled's press release: 

Novaled announced their financial results for 2010. Total revenue increased by 37% to €11.2 million (this was revealed by their CFO last month). OLED license and material sales amounted to €6.12 million. They say that the increase in revenue is mainly due to one customer (which we know to be Samsung). The company had positive EBIDATA for the year, but the cash flow was negative (-€837,000).

Novaled says the 2011 is expected to be another strong year due to new increased OLED production including mass production by new players.

The European OLED100.eu project developed a new OLED lighting panel that is the largest to date: a 33x33cm² panel. The new panel offer 25lm/W at 1000 cd/m² luminance. This relatively good efficiency was achieved using out-coupling and an efficient RGB OLED stack. The panels were fabricated at the Gen-2 line at the Fraunhofer IPMS.

The new panels are based on the on-substrate tiling concept - with 5 segments connected in series. The 33x33cm² panel itself is seamless and so can be tiled to create larger panels. The active area on each panel is 828cm^{2 (}aperture ratio of 76%).

Back in 2006, we published an interview with Andy Hannah, Plextronics' president, CEO and co-founder. Andy agreed to do a follow-up interview to update us on Plextronics' business and technology.

Plextronics is a US-based company (established in 2002, as a spin-out from Carnegie Mellon University) that is developing technology that enables broad market commercialization of organic electronic devices - including OLEDs, plastic chips, polymer solar cells and organic sensors.

Q: Andy, can you give us a short introduction to your OLED technology?

Q: The benefits of OLEDs include, of course, being printable, low cost and demonstrating enhanced device performance. Plextronics’ technology plays a key part in achieving these benefits by reducing operating voltage in devices and thereby increasing lifetime and power efficiency.

Update 2: Universal Display announced the pricing of the public offering: $46 per share. They will sell 5 million shares (plus additional optional 750,000 if there is over-allotments). The net proceeds will be around $217 million (and $250 million if the optional shares are sold as well).

Update: According to a Korea Times article, UDC lost the patent suit in Japan, and their PHOLED material patents have been invalidated - which means that other companies can make phosphorescent OLED materials, at least in Japan. We're not sure if this report is valid though as UDC said yesterday they are still awaiting news on that lawsuit, and we're not sure if those patents aren't material...

Universal Display announced plans to offer 5 million common stocks, which will raise around $225 million according to the current stock price. UDC has around $70 million in cash currently, so it'll be interested to see what they plan to do with so much money. Perhaps they want to acquire a company or they actually do plan to become an OLED lighting manufacturer...

Yesterday we posted Ecosummit TV's video interview with Novaled's co-founder and chief scientist, and today we found another great interview, this time with Harry Boehme, Novaled's CFO. Harry confirms that the company had €11.2 million in revenues in 2010. He also reveals that Novaled are selling materials to a large OLED display maker in Asia - which is Samsung (while not saying this specifically due to NDA, harry admits that they are selling to the 'only AMOLED maker').

Harry also discusses Novaled's technology and markets (they target OLED displays, OLED lighting and organic PV) and estimates that OLEDs will have a 20% share in the flat-panel display market within 5 years. The interview also includes a short visit to Novaled's chemistry lab with with Dr. Mike Zoellner, a project leader.