LG Display is ramping up its flexible OLED production capacity, starting with the E5 line in Gumi. This production line was already supposed to start producing a few months ago, but LGD still faces production issues (which reportedly caused LGD to lose a 3 million OLED supply deal with Xiaomi).

Oppo R11 Plus

It is likely that LGD will begin mass production at the beginning of 2018, and Business Korea now reports that the four largest smartphone makers in China (Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi) have all confirmed plans to adopt LG's flexible OLEDs in 2018. According to the report, LGD will commit 20%-30% of its flexible OLED capacity in 2018 (or about 10-15 million panels) to Chinese phone makers.

Chinese display maker Tianma has demonstrated its latest flexible OLED display, a 5.49" FHD (402 PPI) panel that has a bending radius of 3 mm. You can see the display in the video below (which continues to show Tianma's LCD demonstrations at SID 2017).

In April 2017 TianMa announced that its 6-Gen LTPS AMOLED fab in Wuhan, China, is now starting to produce panels - both rigid and flexible OLEDs.

Samsung has been developing foldable display technologies for many years, and it seems that a foldable phone/tablet is always just around the corner. At a recent press event, Samsung Electronics' Mobile Business group President Koh Dong-Jin updated on the company's foldable smartphone plans.

Foldable OLED concept (2013)

According to Mr. Dong-Jin, Samsung Electronics hopes to release a phone with a bendable display in 2018. However Samsung still faces some technical challenges to overcome so this is still not a hard set target.

Yesterday Apple announced its new iPhone lineup which includes the flagship iPhone X that, as expected, features a 5.8" 1125x2436 (458 PPI) flexible Super AMOLED display that covers almost the entire front of the phone. Apple's first OLED iPhone will ship in November starting at $999.

Some reports suggest that SDC is only able to supply a limited number of displays to Apple which will severely limit iPhone X shipments.

OLED chemical maker Material Science started to develop blue TADF emitters, hoping to be the first company to offer an efficient blue emitter.

According to OLEDNet, Material Science has finished the development of a new fluorescent blue emitter and host system, which it now aims to offer to Samsung and LGD for commercial AMOLED production. Material Science currently offer ETL and HTL materials to OLED makers, with sales reaching $5.8 million in 2016. The company expects its sales to exceed $8.8 million in 2017.

Digitimes posted an interesting story, quoting PlayNitride's CEO that says that Micro-LED displays are easier to produce than people estimate. The company hopes to start mass producing such displays in the second half of 2017.

In PlayNitride's R&D setup, it takes about 10 seconds to transfer and place 200,000 LEDs - which means that a 5" panel will take only 10 minutes to produce. The yield rate at the company's setup is over 99%.

KGI Securities' analyst Ming-Chi Kuo estimates that SDC charges Apple $120 to $130 for each flexible OLED display to be used in the upcoming iPhone OLED edition. Ming-Chi says that the 5.5" LCD used in the iPhone 7+ costs $45-$55.

SDC is the exclusive supplier of OLEDs to Apple (mostly because no other company can produce such high quality displays and at such high volumes) and so can enjoy a high premium on its flexible OLEDs. Other estimates we hear, though, say that the price premium of SDC's flexible OLEDs is only about $50 over a competing LCD. It is a bit difficult to compare these two kinds of displays, though, as flexible OLEDs offer functionality that LCD cannot compete with.

Visionox announced that it has chosen Israel-based Orbotech to supply it with an end-to-end automated optical inspection (AOI) solutions for its upcoming 6-Gen flexible AMOLED fab in Hebei.

This deal includes a large number of Orbotech AOI systems for TFT Array and OLED-related layers for inspection and classification. Among the solutions provided is the Orbotech Quantum Flex series, which will resolve challenges that manufacturers typically face with OLED flexible display processes. The solution includes unique technologies to address the requirements of flexible OLED panel inspection.

Chinese TV maker Changhong demonstrated a new wallpaper-style OLED TV at IFA 2017. The TV prototype supports 4K resolution and HDR.

Changhong actually has a model name for the 65" TV, 65Q5AZH. The company did not yet reveal this an an actual product nor give any launch estimates, but it did say it will also have a 55" model.

According to ETNews, Sunic Systems is set to become a public company via an IPO in Korea towards the end of September. The OLED deposition equipment maker aims to raise between $61 to $73 million.

Sunic business dramatically grew when it started to ship its 6-Gen deposition systems to L G Display, which uses these machines in its E5 mass production line (which reportedly is still struggling with very low yields). Sunic's sales grew from $25.7 million in 2015 to $128 million in 2016.