LG Chem announced today that they are going to cut the prices of their OLED panels at Q3 2014. LG Chem is aiming to cut their prices by about 60% (!) - from about $600/Klm to about $200/Klm. LG Chem will offer these prices at first to selected prices that are willing to "stimulate the market with mass-production of OLED luminaires".
LG Chem explains that this price drop was possible because the company changed the glass substrate and the encapsulation materials in their production process. This enables them to create thinner, light and cheaper panels without any effect on the performance. LG Chem will first upgrade and lower the price of their popular 100x100 mm and 320x110 mm panels, and later on they will upgrade all of their panels.
LG Chem currently offer eight different OLED panels, including the world's largest panel at 320x320 mm. LG Chem's panels feature 60 lm/W and a lifetime of 40,000 hours (LT70).
It personally seems to me that we are at a very critical time for the OLED lighting markets. In the past few months we've seen several promising developments - most notably Konica Minolta's $100 million R2R flexible color-tunable OLED production fab. Hopefully we'll soon see LG Chem and Philips (and maybe others as well) commit to large-scale production fabs which will lower prices dramatically and may help initiate real commercial OLED lighting adoption.
Actually what would be most important at this stage is for a lighting company to come up with a real killer application for OLED lighting. So far 99% of what is around is either directed toward the art/design market (where the volume is next to zero) or it tries to beat LED directly (which at this point honestly is just not possible).