LG Display announced that it plans to invest almost $275 million (310 billion Won) to build a new flexible OLED production line.
This new investment is in addition to the planned E5 6-Gen (1500x1850 mm) flexible OLED fab announced in July 2015. The E5 line will cost $900 million, and will have a capacity of 7,500 monthly substrates - or 1.5 million 5.5" panels. The new fab is scheduled to begin mass production in the first half of 2017.
LGD did not detail what kind of production line it is now aiming to build and what is the planned capacity. Perhaps this new investment (which is rather modest) will aim to bring more capacity to the E5 line. Perhaps this new announcement is a signal to Apple that LG is serious with its flexible OLED program, and can be trusted to be Apple's 2nd flexible OLED supplier...
LG Display also updated on the other OLED projects. The Gen-6 flexible E5 line mentioned above is still on target for H2 2017. So is the P10 fab (for H1 2018) - although the exact production line setup has not been decided yet.
LGD says that it's still confident with its 1 million OLED TV target for 2016, and the company shipped less than 200,000 OLED TVs in Q1 (so less than in Q4 2015). The OLED TV business is still losing money, but LGD says it may turn profitable in 2017 (this depends on volume). Of its OLED TVs, about 70% are 55-inch in size (down from over 85% last year) - the rest are 65-inch.
LG is currently producing 34,000 substrates each month in its Gen-8 OLED TV fab. By H2 2017 this will increase to 60,000. This new capacity was announced back in in January 2016 - in a $380 million investment.
