Back in June 2012 I posted about the new Chinese "Stimulated Blue company" and its AMOLED project. Now I got some new details and corrections for my original story.
First of all, the company's name is AIV-BEX,and not Stimulated Blue. The holding company is Aivtech International Group, a NASDAQ-listed (ticker:AIVI) Shenzhen based maker of audio&video products. The Henan provincial government will provide some of the funding for this project. In fact in November 2012 company official met with Representatives from the Henan government and it seems that the project is progressing smoothly and is actively being supported by the government. In fact they regard it as one of Xinyang Industrial City's key projects.
AIV-BEX plans to construct a 4.5-Gen line that uses Oxide-TFT backplanes and ink-jet printing for the organic material deposition (engaging Dutch based company OLED Technologies & Solutions). The Oxide-TFT panels will actually be produced by Guangzhou New Vision and delivered to AIV-BEX to complete the process. AIV-BEX's line will have a monthly capacity of 30,000 sheets. The first panels will be around 4.3" in size and WVGA in resolution (220 ppi), so they can make around 40 million such panels in a year.
Currently the plan is to start production in 2014. The total investment in this project will be around ¥30 billion (or about $4.82 billion, including building all the infrastructure such as roads and power lines), and the first line (with the 30,000 monthly sheet capacity) will cost ¥3.6 billion ($580 million). Obviously this is a very ambitious project, especially if you consider that AIV is currently trading at a value of around $1.7 to $3 million USD. It doesn't seem likely to me that this company will be able to raise the cash needed to develop this project (although the local government will help with the funding and AIV claims they have investors lined up).
So, while this project seems promising, there are still some large questions markets regarding the funding (also the fact that they cannot spell "OLED Project" correctly in the opening ceremony does not give me a lot of confidence, but I learned that those kinds of mistakes are common in china). Hopefully we'll get more information about this project in the future.
