Tianma - Page 6

TianMa Micro-Electronics announced that its 6-Gen LTPS AMOLED fab in Wuhan, China, is now starting to produce panels. This is the first 6-Gen AMOLED line in China to enter production. The new fab will produce both rigid and flexible OLEDs.

AMOLED panel produced at TianMa 6-Gen fab, Wuhan

According to reports TianMa is focusing on VR and AR devices, wearable devices and foldable devices. Last month TianMa demonstrated three OLED panels - a 5.5" FHD panel, a 5-inch FHD panel and a flexible 5.46" panel, so it's likely that the smartphone market is also in focus.

A report from SinoCast claims that LG has decided to sell OLED production equipment to Tianma. The deal was signed in May 2016 and deliveries of the equipment have now commenced.

TianMa 6-Gen AMOLED fab, Wuhan

This is a rather strange report. First of all, the company mentioned was LG Electronics, which do not produce OLED displays - LG Display (the report does say that "LGD uses the same equipment").

Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) released some very interesting information regarding the mobile OLED market from its recent OLED market report by Yoshio Tamura and Ross Young. DSCC expects mobile AMOLED demand to grow from almost 400 million panels in 2016 to almost 1.2 billion in 2021.

Samsung Electronics, who's already using AMOLED displays in almost 80% of its smartphones will not increase its AMOLED orders by a lot, but shipments will grow dramatically to other players led by Apple, Huawei and Oppo.

According to Digitimes Research, OLED display makers in China will increase their total annual capacity from 272,000 m² in 2016 to 7.86 million m² in 2020 - a CAGR or 131.9%.

The largest producer in 2020 will be BOE Display (35% of the Chinese OLED market), followed by Tianma (17.6%), Visionox (14%), Everdisplay (11.6%), CSoT (9.5%), Truly (7.8%) and Royole (4.5%).

IHS says that combine OLED shipments from all active Chinese OLED makers reached over a 1.4 million panels in Q3 2016 . This is still small relative to Samsung's capacity (which made around 70 million panels in the quarter) but a step forward for these companies.

IHS says that strong demand from Chinese smartphone brands (see chart above), mostly Oppo and Vivo boosted the demand for AMOLED displays. Coupled with the reported supply shortage at SDC this created an opportunity for the new OLED makers based in China. In Q2 2016 these Chinese OLED makers produced around 600,000 panels (so production more than doubled in the quarter.

According to a story on iTers News, Tianma is planning to construct a 6-Gen AMOLED fab in Xiamen, China. The fab's capacity will be 30,000 monthly substrates.

The origin of this story is from LG Electronics' whose PRI research institute won a bid to supply ELA LTPS laser equipment to Tianma's upcoming fab.

Blue TADF developer Cynora signed a MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with Guangdong Juhua Printing Display Technology to cooperate on OLED TV development.

Johua was established earlier this year by CSoT (66%) and TianMa (34%) with an aim to industrialize printed OLED technologies. Johua Printing is an "open innovation platform" guided by the Chinese government that collaborates with both industry and universities to drive the progress of China's display industry and the GUangdong Province specifically.

Universal Display signed a five-year OLED Technology License Agreement and Supplemental Material Purchase Agreement with Tianma Micro-electronics. Under the license agreement, UDC granted Tianma non-exclusive license rights to manufacture and sell OLED display products based on its IPs. UDC will also supply phosphorescent OLED materials to Tianma.

Tianma is currently producing AMOLED displays in low volume in its 5.5-Gen pilot fab in Shanghai (our own sources say that these displays are not commercial yet but will be so by the end of 2016). In May 2016 the company demonstrated flexible and rigid OLED prototypes, including a 5.5" 702p (270 PPI) flexible OLED prototype with a bending radius of 20 mm.

ETNews posted an interesting story, in which it is said that Chinese display makers are diverting investments away from LCD production and into flexible OLED production. ETNews lists BOE Display, CSoT, TianMa and Visionox - all bringing forward flexible OLED plans.

Flexible OLED prototype, Tianma

Tianma and Visionox, according to ETNews, already started to make actual investment and placed initial equipment orders for flexible OLED production. BOE and CSoT decided to postpone 8-gen LCD investment plans and will start investing in flexible OLEDs by the end of 2016.

Tianma demonstrated the company's latest OLED panels at SID 2016. Tianma is developing flexible OLEDs, and the company had a 5.5" prototype on display:

The panel featured a resolution of 720x1280 (270 PPI) and a bending radius of 20 mm. This seems to be the same panel demonstrated at MWC 2016.