UBI Research lowered its forecast for the OLED industry in 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic. UBI decreased its total market revenue forecast by 4.8% to $36.7 billion.
UBI now estimates that 612 million OLED panels will ship in 2020, down from its previous estimate of 660 million. The OLED TV market forecast was reduced dramatically from 4.9 million panels to 3.6 million.
IHS Markit says that the rollable OLED market is finally starting to emerge, and will grow quickly but unit shipments will remain slow in the foreseeable future. IHS sees 100,000 rollable OLED displays shipped in 2022, growing to 1.3 million by 2026. The CAGR from 2019 to 2026 will be 167%.
Rollable OLEDs will remain a niche- the share of rollable OLEDs from all flexible OLEDs will be 0.2% in 2026. Foldable OLEDs will be a much larger market - reaching 71.3 million units in 2025.
TCL subsidiary China Star Optoelectronics (CSoT) signed an OLED technology license agreement and material purchase agreement with Universal Display (UDC). UDC will supply phosphorescent OLED materials CSoT to be used in its display products.
CSoT is currently producing flexible OLEDs in its T4 line which has a monthly capacity of 45,000 6-Gen substrates. Last week it was reported that CSoT is planning to build a new flexible OLED production line in Wuhan, in a $1.4 billion investment.
DSCC updated its OLED material market estimates, saying that AMOLED stack material sales will grow from $951 million in 2019 to $2.69 billion in 2024 - a CAGR of 23%. These new estimates take into account DSCC's reduced input area forecast due to the slowdown in demand cased by the Covid-19 pandemic.
DSCC says that incremental improvements in material utilization and price reductions, material costs per square meters will decline in the future. The unyielded cost of producing a square meter of a WOLED TV panel will decline from $95.21 in 2019 to $56.11 in 2024.
Universal Display reported its Q1 2020 financial results. While the company and its market are effected by the Corona Virus, UDC had an excellent quarter with revenues of $112.3 million (material sales of $66.6 million, up from $60.8 million in Q4 2019 and $54.5 million in Q1 2019) and a net income of $38.2 million.
At the end of the quarter, UDC had $640 million in cash and equivalents. Due to the pandemic, the company withdraws its 2020 annual guidance. UDC also says that some of its orders in the quarter was due to its customers stocking up inventory due to industry uncertainties.
This article is an extract from The MicroLED Handbook, 2020 edition, and gives a short introduction to the current market status of MicroLED Microdisplays. The handbook was published in January 2020 - there has been some updates since then, for example Plessey's recent soft-acquisition by Facebook and MICLEDI's technology was revealed.
There are several companies that develop microLED microdisplays, and these are gearing up to begin mass production of displays soon. It is likely that microdisplays will be the first type of commercial displays enabled by microLED technology.
OLED driver IC developer MagnaChip announced its financial results for Q1 2020. OLED DDIC revenue was $69.7 million, up 43.6% from last year and up 3.5% from last quarter. The company estimates that 8 new smartphones that adopt its OLED drivers were released in Q1 2020, and 9 just entered pilot production.
MagnaChip has a total of 16 OLED display drivers, almost double the number of drivers it had in its portfolio in Q1 2019. The company has started to develop OLED drivers for automotive products, which the company expects to to into production in the first half of 2021.
According to reports from Korea, LG Display expects a decline of up to 10% in demand for OLED TV panels in Q2 2020, due to the CoronaVirus pandemic.
LGD's original plan was to ship over 6 million OLED TV panels in 2020 - which include the smaller 48" OLED TV panels launched at CES 2020. In its latest note, DSCC sees 4.5 million OLED TV panels being produced in 2020, while Omdia's forecast is for only 3.5 million TVs.
This article is an extract from The OLED Handbook, 2020 edition, and gives a short introduction to the current OLED TV market status. The latest edition of the OLED handbook was published in March 2020.
The OLED TV market is completely dominated today by LG Display, the only company that produces OLED TVs commercially. In 2013 both Samsung and LGD commenced production of OLED TVs, but Samsung quickly halted its OLED TV program to focus on Quantum-Dots enhanced TVs. In 2019 Samsung announced it is re-entering the OLED TV market and is set to build a QD-OLED production fab (more on this below).
LG Display adopted Kodak’s WRGB OLED technology (now owned by LG’s own GOT) and this technology, combined with oxide-TFT (IGZO) backplanes, enabled the company to economically scale up its large-area panel production. LG Display is producing 48 to 88 OLED TV panels, and is supplying its panels to several TV makers, including LGE, Sony, Panasonic, Philips and more.
Kopin Corporation reported its financial results for Q1 2020 - with $7.9 million in revenues (up 42% from Q1 2019) and a 50% decrease in R&D expenses as the company implements its strategic realignment program.
Kopin also announced that during the quarter it received the first commercial order for its OLED backplane wafers. Interestingly Kopin says the order was for wafers and not complete displays. Kopin says that its current internal R&D investments are primarily focused on OLED displays.
