Visionox - Page 11

Yeolight Technology (which was spun-off Visionox in May 2015) developed a 0.1 mm flexible OLED panel. This is a red OLED panel that is specifically designed for automotive applications.

The light emitting area is 13 cm² and the whole panel weighs just 1 gram. Yeolight says that the panel uniformity is over 90%. The panel uses a "special organic polymer" that Yeolight developed and used new materials, package structure and processes in order to improve the lifetime and durability of its new panel.

Yeolight Technology (which was spun-off Visionox in May 2015) developed a new bright Amber OLED panel. The panel's size is 85x85 mm (active area 76.5x76.5 mm) and its color temperature is 2000K-2600K. The efficiency is >70 lm/W at 2,000 cd/m2 brightness. The lifetime is over 20,000 hours.

This new panel is still a prototype - but Yeolight says it can already be mass produced at the company's 2.5-Gen production line.

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%).

China's Yeolight has opened an OLED lighting exhibition center, located in GU’an city Hebei province, China. Yeolight says that at 431 sqm, this is the largest OLED lighting gallery in China. Most of the OLED panels on display are produced by Yeolight, but some are made by LG Display.

The exhibition center has six different "experience" areas that demonstrate a range of OLED installations, including commercial lighting, interior lighting and automotive lighting. The center also includes explanations of OLED lighting technology and fabrication processes.

We spent last week visiting China - mostly around Shanghai. We attended the Printed & Flexible Electronics China 2017 conference, visited both EverDisplay and Visionox to learn more about their OLED products and plans, and also went to Wuxi to see the interesting and quite impressive graphene center over there.

Samsung Display and LG Display are the clear leaders in AMOLED production - for almost 10 years now. But the market is now changing as several new players, mostly in China, are starting to commercially produce AMOLED displays - mostly for mobile phones, wearables and VR headsets.

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.

Korean manufacturing equipment maker SFA Engineering announced that it secured a $93.5 million order from China's Visionox. SFA will deliver the equipment by August 2017.

Visionox has started mass producing AMOLED panels in June 2015, but the company's production capacity is still limited. Visionox's Gen-5.5 AMOLED line in Kunshan can currently produce around 4,000 monthly substrate, and once yields stabilize they will reach a full capacity of 15,000 monthly substrates. The company is mulling a $673 million investment to expand the capacity of this fab.

Yeolight Technology (which was spun-off Visionox in May 2015) announced its first OLED lamp, the limited-edition OLED Organic Lamp. The OLED lamp was designed by Qiu Song, an industrial designer from Tsinghua University. The lamp design inspiration came from swan feathers - "with its effortless glide on the mirror of a lake, unfurling flight, this OLED lamp brings us the beauty of serenity".

Yeolight will produce only 500 lamps, with the price set at 2,200 RMB (around $325 USD). Yeolight now accepts orders and ships globally.

When Samsung started producing AMOLED displays in 2007, AMOLED technology was at a very early stage, immature, and Samsung took a huge risk. A few years later, this risk was rewarded with a successful display business and a boost to the company's smartphone business that was the first to adopt AMOLED displays.

Fast forward to 2016, and today Samsung is still the king of AMOLED displays, with a market share of over 95% in small/medium AMOLED panels. If we look at OLED TV production, then LG Display is the only commercial producer at this stage. But Samsung and LG are not alone - several companies in China and Taiwan already started mass producing AMOLEDs, and others have announced plans for large AMOLED fabs. In this long article we'll list all of these AMOLED producers and developers (over a dozen) - and details their current production capacity and rumored and confirmed production plans.