Philips announced its intention to spin-off its OLED activity. Philips is searching for a buyer for its whole OLED business activity. Following the spin-off, Philips Lighting will focus on LED based connected systems and services.
Philips has been one of the leaders in the OLED lighting industry for years, so this is a major announcement and a very interesting one - and only time will tell whether this move will be positive or not for OLED technology. From my contacts at Philips it seems that this is seen as a very positive development for OLEDs...
Philips stated several times that they expect the OLED lighting to finally emerge to the mass market by the end of 2016 or early 2017 at the latest. In the meantime the OLED business will require more funds (especially as at some stage they will need to expand production capacity which will require a large investment) and hopefully a right buyer will come to take this technology to the next level. Last month we posted about an interesting lecture given by Philips explaining its technology and production process status.
I wish all my friends at Philips the best of luck...
Comments
Do you think there's a chance that spinning this off to the likes of LG would be a good idea?
how much value would this have for the LG group, when LG Chem is producing OLED lighting panels themselves?
If I compare panel prices, there does seem much differentiation in production cost between Philips and LG Chem...
maybe somebody who focused also on materials and does not seem to have equal production know-how and capacity is more likely to see value in buying Philips' OLED business...
Do you know what will happen to the OLED-R&D unit at Philips?
As far as I know, they are not part of the "OLED Lighting" business unit, but belong to "Philips Resreach".
Often a spin out enables the spun out entity the ability to focus on their business without being burdened by "corporate" issues. This is especially true in high growth situations where the high growth spin out needs growth capital, but if it remains under the larger corporate parent, the parent stock gets punished for the extra spending. With a singular focus, the spin out can also make decisions faster and those results will be recognized by the market.
A great example of this was McDonald's ownership of Chipotle Mexican Grill. When this occured there were many who said "MCD would not be spinning this out if they believed in the concept" and "if anyone knows the fast food business, its MCD, and if they are selling, I'm not buying". This spinout occured in early 2006 at about $40/share. Nine years later, CMG is now over $700/share. I hope that the public market will get a shot at a pure play OLED lighting company!
Is this separate from the June 2014 reports of their plans to spinout Lumileds and automotive lighting? Or is Lumileds going to include OLED?
This article gives some context to Philips actions.
They will close the research group and lay off all researchers.
To me going from being part of one of the largest lighting manufacturers in the world to a (presumably) relatively small stand alone business does not seem very likely "to be a very positive development".
Had they at least stayed part of Philips Lighting during the overall lighting spin-off the impact might have been ok, but being spun-off independently from both Lumileds and Philips lighting...sorry, this does not sound good at all for OLEDs.