Several new reports today suggests that Samsung is accelerating its OLED development. First up is Samsung Electronics, which announced that flexible OLEDs is one of three businesses areas it will focus on for future growth (the other two businesses are fin-FET semiconductors and startup incubating).
Samsung Display, meanwhile, updated that they aim to launch a foldable OLED panel (that can be folded in half) by the end of 2015. This is not really news as it was stated back in 2013, but it's still good to hear they still aim to produce foldable displays next year. SDC also hints at a possible multi-edged smartphone that will succeed the Note Edge which uses a one-sided curved OLED.
SDC says that flexible OLED display capacity will reach 30,000 to 40,000 monthly display panels. Actually this sounds like a very low capacity and it's likely they mean 30,000 monthly substrates.
Samsung is currently producing flexible OLEDs in a 5.5-Gen line with a capacity of only 8,000 substrates per month. A few months ago the company confirmed that it is constructing a new 6-Gen (1850x1500 mm) fab that will be dedicated to flexible OLED production.
In addition, it seems that Samsung is close to overcome one of its major flexible OLED production challenges - the encapsulation layer deposition. It's highly likely that the company decided to adopt Kateeva's new ink-jet based encapsulation mass-production system.
