Recent Premium Stories

Recently, we have started to witness a new trend in the display manufacturing equipment industry - companies that supply deposition systems to OLED fabs are now actively developing, testing, and commercializing equipment for perovskite solar cell production. The same is true for OLED material makers.

In this article we introduce the perovskite industry and market, discuss the perovskites production process, talk about OLED process companies and material developers active with perovskites, and give advice to industry players.

Several companies, including Sunic System, Jusung Engineering, and Suzhou Precision Systems (SPS) have already finalized their R&D, and secured perovskite equipment contracts. This is not coincidental. The technological DNA of OLED deposition — vacuum chambers, large-area thin-film coating, precision moisture control, encapsulation — maps almost perfectly onto the manufacturing requirements of perovskite devices. At the same time that interest in perovskites is at an all time high, the OLED equipment market is entering a plateau phase and future investments are uncertain. For equipment makers, the timing could not be more deliberate.

In our OLED history article series, we look back 20, 10, and 5 years ago, and revisit the history of the OLED industry. We hope these are articles are nostalgic, and fun - but also informative - by reflecting on the past, we can better understand how far the industry has come and where it is headed. 

20 years ago - Q2 2006

In early 2006, the industry was still at a very early stage, mostly focused on PMOLED production and microdisplays. In may 2006, Universal Display reported revenues of $3.2 million in revenues from the quarter - mostly from grants, projects and development materials. This is far from its current $170 million quarter, but it was actually more than double its Q2 2005 revenues. In Q2 2006, UDC started working with Mitsubishi on inkjet printing materials, and with Nippon Steel Chemicals on evaporation materials. We posted an interview with UDC's VP Janice Mahone - this is an interesting read from a 20 years perspective. The company was already getting ready for Samsung's 2007 AMOLED production.

Over the past few months, several OLED-Info Pro readers have asked me to revisit Universal Display Corporation (UDC) from a fresh perspective: not as a classic high-growth OLED pure play, but as a potential value stock in a maturing industry ecosystem. This article is my attempt to answer that request directly, and to frame UDC as an established, cash-generative business.

It is important to state - this article is not an investment advice, and you should learn more before you make investment decisions. The author of this post may (and actually does) hold a position in some of the mentioned companies.

Universal Display is one of the OLED industry’s pioneers, a US-based IP and materials company whose phosphorescence emitter technologies and compounds sit at the heart of many of the world’s commercial OLED displays, from smartphones and TVs to IT and automotive panels. The company licenses its OLED patents and sells proprietary PHOLED materials to virtually all leading panel makers, generating high-margin, royalty-like revenue streams from a portfolio that now numbers thousands of issued and pending patents worldwide. We recently posted a spotlight article that discusses UDC's current status and future prospects.

Truly International Holdings is a Hong-Kong headquartered display and electronics manufacturer with over four decades of history, a public company that trades in the HK stock exchange (HKEX: 00732). Truly mostly operates its display business through its subsidiary Truly Semiconductors.

The company is the world's 2nd largest small and medium display maker, operating LCD, PMOLED, and AMOLED fabs, serving automotive, smartphone, wearable, industrial, and medical markets.

Truly is one of the world's leading PMOLED maker, and it is also a small-scale AMOLED maker. In the mid-2010s, Truly had ambitious plans to expand its AMOLED production, but the company later effectively retreated from its large-scale AMOLED strategy, formally terminating its planned 27.9 billion Yuan 6th-Gen AMOLED JV in September 2024, and is instead doubling down on TFT-LCD and niche OLED applications.

In 2025 , the US and Japan signed a trade agreement, which included a commitment by Japan to invest $550 billion directly in the US. These funds will be targeted at industries such as energy, critical minerals, pharmaceutical and medical, shipbuilding - and semiconductor manufacturing and research, with an aim to rebuild U.S. capacity from design to fabrication.

According to a new report from Japan, and as part of that trade agreement and investment commitment, the Japanese government is now looking at building a $13 billion fab in the US, that will be operated by Japan Display. In this article, we look at JDI's history and capabilities (LCD and OLED production), consider the geopolitical implications and the market that this new fab will address, speculate whether it makes sense for JDI to initiate OLED production in the US (or will it choose LCD, or perhaps even microLED), and if so - which technologies and architectures will this fab utilize? 

AMOLED display producer Visionox provided an update on its pTSF OLED emitter material technology, that it has been developing for many years in collaboration with Tsinghua University since 2014.

pTSF, or  Phosphor-assisted TADF Sensitized Fluorescence is an emitter platform that is based on three materials, phosphorescence materials, TADF-type materials, and a fluorescent emitter. According to Visionox, this emitter system enables high power consumption, long lifetime, and a narrowband emission (to enable a wide color gamut display). In an exciting announcement, Visionox revealed that it is already mass producing pTSF OLEDs - in this article we detail Visionox's pTSF technology, its latest status, its future roadmaps, and what it means for UDC and other emitter producers.