Update: Doosan announced that it decided not to acquire Novaled.
According to Reuters, Korea's Doosan is going to acquire Novaled, for $270-360 million. The deal is not final, but we hear that they expect to finalize it and announce it as soon as next month. A year ago Novaled announced plans for an IPO on the NASDAQ with an aim to raise $200 million, but indeed it's been a while since we heard any news on the IPO.
In 2011, Novaled reported â¬17.4 in revenues and a profit of â¬1.2 million. It is estimated that sales in 2012 were about the same with a higher profit of over â¬3 million. Obviously they expect sales and revenues to increase sharply in coming years as the OLED display (and perhaps lighting) market takes off. Novaled supplies OLED materials to both Samsung and LG Display, and in fact an industry insider once told me that "everybody uses Novaled's materials".
This seems to be a good deal for Novaled, and will be one of the largest deals in the OLED industry (joining the $285 million CDT acquisition by Sumitomo in 2007 and the $250 million UDC raised in 2011). It's a very large valuation (16X sales and over 100X profit) and as Doosan is the buyer, it hopefully means Novaled will continue to supply materials to other companies. I think that another public pure-play OLED company would have been better for the OLED industry, but this is still a very good validation for the technology and market.
Novaled says that using their technology and materials overall display product power efficiency can be increased by up to 40%, and overall display product lifetime can be increased by up to 500%. Use of their outcoupling solutions can further increase power efficiency by up to 80%, with approximately half of the gains coming from their proprietary outcoupling materials.
Novaled is collaborating with several companies: producers of emission and other OLED materials (including UDC, Sumitomo, BASF, SFC and Hodogaya) and producers of OLED substrates, electrodes and outcoupling materials such as Saint-Gobain. The company is engaged in R&D projects with lot's of companies, including Philips, Sumitomo, Heliatek, Bosch, Alanod, ArcelorMittal, TUD, the Fraunhofer Institute of Dresden and the Max Planck Institute.
Novaled has been an OLED-Info sponsor for several years now, and I hope them the best of luck!
