Universal Display Corporation (UDC)

Universal Display Corporation announced the establishment of a new award, the Sherwin I. Seligsohn Innovation Award in honor of UDC’s late founder. Through this award competition, UDC seeks to support and celebrate organic electronics innovation.

The aware amount is $75,000 and researchers can now submit their research (submissions will be accepted until June 302025). The award is open to individuals and teams from around the world, and is also open for both academic and non-academic groups that are pushing organic electronics innovation in new and exciting ways. The theme of the 2025 award is organic photovoltaics or solar (OPVs). 

A report from Korea says that LG Display has successfully developed an OLED panel that is based on a blue phosphorescence emitter. The blue PHOLED, provided by Universal Display, offers 100% IQE, up from 25% used by current fluorescence emitters. This will result in around 20-30% power saving for the display itself (depending on the images shown).

UDC has been developing blue emitters for many years, and recently the company said that the development will take a few more months and won't be ready in 2024. The main challenge is increasing the lifetime of the materials. However LG Display has adopted a tandem design to enable a commercially ready display, perhaps even sooner than UDC planned.

Universal Display Corporation reported its financial results for Q2 2024, with revenues of $159 million (up 8% from Q2 2023 and a net income of $52 million (up from $50 million in Q2 2023). The company ended the quarter with $879 million in cash and equivalents.

UDC says it believes the OLED market's trajectory is robust, and it is raising the lower end of its annual guidance, now saying that its revenues will be in the range of $645 million to $675 million.

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. 

Universal Display Corporation reported its financial results for Q4 2023, with revenues of $158 million, and a net income of $62 million. For the whole year (2023), UDC reproted revenues of $576 million and net income of $203 million. The company ended 2023 with $800 million in cash and equivalents, and has increased its quarterly dividend.

UDC says that the market still suffers from soft spending in smartphone and premium TVs. UDC, however, says that it believes that the OLED industry is starting a new and exciting multiyear investment cycle.

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.

Researchers from the University of Michigan developed a new OLED emitter system, based on a blue phosphorescence emitter, based on the polariton-enhanced Purcell effect. This new emitter systems offers high stability and high efficiency. 

The basic idea is to start with a light-blue (cyan) phosphorescence emitter (which offers a longer lifetime than a deep blue emitter), and placing it between two mirrors. The distance between the mirrors is controlled so that only deep blue light waves persist and are emitter from the mirror chamber. The researchers also tuned the optical properties of the OLED stack to the adjacent metal electrode which introduced a new quantum mechanical state called a plasmon-exciton-polariton, or PEP. This new state allows the organic material to emit light very fast, thus even further increasing the lifetime by decreasing the opportunity for excited states to collide and destroy the light-emitting material.

Merck KGaA is a pioneer in high performance OLED material development, supplying a range of materials for AMOLED makers since the industry’s inception.

To learn more about Merck’s materials and views on the OLED industry, we conducted an interview with Dr. Georg Bernatz, Merck Electronics’ Global Head of OLED Technical Marketing. Georg Bernatz has received a PhD in Physics from the Philipps-Universität in Marburg, Germany in 2000. In 2004, Georg joined Merck, where, over the years, he worked in various functions and on various topics in the field of Liquid Crystals for displays. In 2018, Georg changed to OLED, leading OLED Physics Product Research, and in 2020 he became responsible for all Physics & Application Labs in Darmstadt for Display materials. Since October 2023, Georg is heading Merck’s Global Technical Marketing for OLED materials.

Hello Dr. Bernatz. Can you bring us up to date quickly on Merck's current OLED material products? What do you offer to OLED display makers?

Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany is very active in the design, development and production of a broad variety of high performing OLED materials, with a strong focus on hole and electron transport materials (HTM, ETM), host materials for phosphorescent emitters as well as activities in the field of high efficiency blue.