Pioneer / SOAR - OLED company spotlight, history and future

We are launching a new OLED-Info Pro premium article series, spotlights on OLED companies. Each article will look into one OLED industry company, detailing its past, present and future. In this first article, we are focused on Pioneer, the first company to produce OLED displays commercially. 

Pioneer corporation history

Pioneer Corporation was established in 1938, in Tokyo, by Nozomu Matsumoto. The company started out as a radio and speaker repair shop, under the name Fukuin Shokai Denki Seisakusho. Matsumoto developed a dynamic speaker, and named it the A-8 "Pioneer". In 1961, the company name was changed to Pioneer Electronic Corporation, inspired by the A-8 Pioneer speaker. This was a suitable name - the company was indeed a pioneer in the audio industry - it launched the first separate stereo system in 1962, the first component car stereo system in 1975 and the first car CD player in 1984.

But more interesting for us, Pioneer was also a display maker. The company started making projection monitors in the 1980s, and also produced TVs and other display types. In 1997 it introduced its first Plasma display, the 50" PDP-501HD. In 2007, Pioneer launched its premium Kuro range of Plasma TVs (Kuro in Japanese means black, a nod to the 'infinite' contrast of Plasma panel). Kuro TVs were considered to offer the very best (up until these days, some consider this to be true), but never reached commercial success and were discontinued in 2009 as LCDs technology took over the TV market. Pioneer ended up selling its Plasma IP to Panasonic - but its Pioneer TV brand continued to exist, and today it is licensed to TCL.

A Pioneer 60" Kuro Plasma TV (PRO-151FD)