Dupont

DSCC says that the OLED materials market will reach $2.12 billion in 2024, rising 24% over 2023. The market will continue growing at a 6% CAGR until 2028, reaching about $2.7 billion. DSCC details the revenue split between single-stack, tandem and multi-stack panels, saying that materials used in tandem OLED panels will grow at a fast rate of 30% CAGR from 2024-2028. 

The leading materials makers by revenue in 2024 will be UDC, DuPont, LG Chemical and Samsung SDI, holding a market share of 51% together. DSCC says that Chinese materials makers will increase their market share in the future. 

DSCC estimates that the market for OLED evaporation materials (i.e. OLED stack materials) will reach $1.7 billion in 2023, and will grow to $2.7 billion in 2027 (a 11% CAGR from 2023). If UDC will succeed to commercially introduce a blue phosphorescence material, revenues can even be much higher.

OLED materials used in TV applications (and other large-area applications) will grow from $305 million in 2023, to $492 million in 2027, a 13% CAGR. DSCC also sees very fast growth in material used to produce tandem-structure IT displays, which will grow at a 79% CAGR to reach $443 million in 2027.

DSCC updated its OLED material market data, and it now sees AMOLED stack material revenues growing at a 18% from 2020 ($1.07 billion) to 2026 ($2.9 billion). If UDC actually manages to release a commercial blue PHOLED, the market could even exceed $3 billion.

The majority of OLED material revenues from from TV applications, but the market share of mobile devices is expected to grow and reach almost 50% by 2026.

Last year LG Display unveiled its latest OLED TV technology, branded as OLED EX, which uses a deuterium-based blue emitter materials, that enabled that LG to increase brightness by up to 30%. These panels are now adopted in LG's higher-end OLED TV panels.

According to a report from Korea, the deuterium-based blue emitters were supplied to LGD by DuPont. But the company has also been working its affiliate LG Chem to develop the capabilities to produce a similar deuterium emitter, and now LG Chem is starting to supply some of these materials to LGD.

UBI Research says that the OLED emitter material market reached $421 million in Q1 2022, down 21.1% from the previous quarter, but up 9% compared to Q1 2021. UBI estimates that the OLED emitter material market will reach $1.77 billion in 2022, and will grow to $2.4 billion by 2026.

UBI says that sale of materials for TV and mobile devices decreased (compared to Q4 2021) while sales of materials for the production of IT (laptops, tablets and monitors) displays were up $6.6 million.

According to reports from Korea, P&H Tech signed a long-term contact with Dupont, for the supply of OLED materials. The deal, worth $6 million USD (paid up front), will last until 2028.

It is not clear what kind of materials will P&H Tech supply - whether these will be OLED intermediates or OLED stack materials, as P&H supplies both. The company did say that the materials it will supply to Dupont "can improve the life and luminance of OLED panels".

LG Chem has acquired DuPont's soluble OLED technologies and assets, in a deal estimated at $175 million. LG Chem will receive DuPont's entire soluble OLED IP (540 materials and process patents) and all of DuPont's related equipment and R&D facilities. The deal does not include any assets related to Dupont's evaporation OLED business.

LG Chem believes that the OLED industry is moving towards ink-jet printing of OLED panels based on soluble OLED materials and technologies - and it has now acquired key technologies in this area. DuPont has been developing related materials for over 20 years, has been collaborating with equipment makers (such as Kateeva) and display makers and has also developed its own nozzle-printing process.

Last month CSoT (TCL) announced plans to establish a 11-Gen LCD+OLED TV fab in Shenzhen, China. Details on the OLED part of that fab were not given, but now we have some updates following the company's investor day.

The new fab will use Oxide-TFT backplanes, and it turns out that the OLED part of the fab will also use the 11-Gen substrates (which may be cut for the actual OLED front plane deposition). Out of the entire capacity of 90,000 monthly substrates, the OLED line will use 20,000 substrates. The fab will start mass production in 2021.

According to a story on ETNews, Samsung aims to use a full-screen display in its next flagship phone, the Galaxy S8. To achieve such a display, Samsung is using a flexible AMOLED that is wrapped around all four sides of the phone (unlike its current edge phones that are cured on two edges only).

ETNews also says that SDC is set to update its OLED material recipe. The so-called M7 iteration was used in the Galaxy Note 5, the GS7 and the Note 7. But now Samsung is updating its recipe to M8. You can see the different suppliers in the chart above. Most materials are sourced from the same supplier, but of course the suppliers are offering newer, updated materials and Samsung may switch to those.

A few weeks ago we posted about Merck's soluble OLED material performance, and today we have some more data from the OLED Association. In the table below you can see how Merck's, Sumitomo and DuPont's soluble materials compare to UDC's evaporable OLED's materials.

As you can see, for the red material, evaporable OLEDs have a clear lead in lifetime and efficiency. For the green material that efficiency gap has pretty much closed, while the lifetime of the evaporable materials are still about double than the best soluble materials.