In March 2017 Konica Minolta and Pioneer announced that the two companies are set to merge their OLED business unit, and on June 1st the new 50:50 joint venture, called Konica Minolta Pioneer OLED, was officially established.

Konica Minolta says that the new company will take charge of all business and product planning, product development, production technology development and marketing functions of both companies' OLED lighting business to drive its initiatives.

In January 2017 we reported that Konica Minolta and Pioneer are set to merge their OLED business unit, and today Konica Minolta officially announced a joint-venture with Pioneer to accelerate automotive OLED lighting.

Konica Minolta and Pioneer will setup a joint venture, which will be called Konica Minolta Pioneer OLED. The new 50:50 JV company will be established in May 2017 with an initial capital of 490 million yen (about $4.4 million) and a focus on OLED lighting for automotive applications.

According to the Nikkei Asian Review, Konica Minolta and Pioneer are in talks to merge their OLED lighting business. According to the report, the two companies are finalizing the agreement, and will setup a new 50:50 joint venture in the spring.

Both companies are producing OLEDs, and the two production facilities will still be owned by the parent companies - but the OLED R&D and sales operations and will be spun-off to a new company.

IDTechEx released a new report on OLED lighting, in which it is forecasted (this is the optimistic scenario, though) that the OLED lighting market will reach more than $1.8 billion in 2025 at the panel level. IDTechEx is optimistic about OLED lighting in the long term - because "OLED lighting exhibits key characteristics of a disruptive technology".

According to IDTechEx, OLED lighting, compared to LED lighting, is under performing and is over priced. But OLED lighting can create new markets that value large areas emission, light-weight and flexibility.

IDTechEx posted a very interesting analysis of the OLED lighting market, in which they see the OLED market growing very slowly - it will remain smaller than $80 million until 2017. The market will start picking up to reach $840 million in 2022 - still a very small slice of the global lighting market.

IDTechEx says that OLED technology is very slow to close up to performance and cost gap to LED based lighting. In addition, following the recent Philips OLED BU sale to OLEDworks (and Panasonic decision to dissolve its OLED lighting activity back in March 2014), the only two major companies left in the OLED market is LG Chem and Konica Minolta.

A few weeks ago we reported that Konica Minolta shipped 15,000 flexible OLED lighting panels to a Japanese Tulip festival. The panels are embedded in tulip flowers. Today we got this video showing the installation in action, and we also learned that in total there are 5,000 tulips - as each one has 3 petals with OLED panels (so 3 OLEDs per Tulip).

These are the first OLED panels that were produced at Konica' new $100 million R2R flexible OLED lighting fab. This breakthough fab, will have a monthly capacity of a million panels at full capacity, and it produces both white and color-tunable flexible panels. The white panel is 150x60 mm in size (0.35 mm thick) and weights 5 grams. The color-tunable is smaller (50x30 mm, 0.29 mm thick, 0.6 grams). Both panels are flexible with a curvature radius of 10 mm.

Konica Minolta recently started mass producing flexible OLED lighting panels, and the Japanese company now announced that it shipped 15,000 flexible OLEDs to a Japanese Tulips Festival - by far the largest OLED installation to date.

The OLED "Shining Tulip Festival" will take place at the Japanese Huisch Tembosch theme park, from February 14th to April 13th. Konica are making both white and color-tunable OLEDs, but it seems that this installation uses only white panels.

In March 2014 Konica Minolta announced that it is starting to construct a R2R flexible OLED lighting fab with plans to start production in the fall of 2014. The company now updates that the equipment is now running, and first panel samples are being produced. KM still aims to start shipping commercial products in the fall.

Konica invested ¥10 billion (almost $100 million) in the new fab, which will have a monthly capacity of a million panels. This will represent a breakthrough in OLED lighting capacity.

Three weeks ago, Seeking Alpha published my first article on Universal Display, titled "Universal Display: 20X Jackpot In 2018?" - in which I presented my best-case scenario for the OLED market (and UDC) in 2018.

I think the article was received well, and today SA published my second article - "Universal Display's Second Key Customer Is On Its Way". In this new article I explain why Samsung Display is such an important customer for UDC - and how I expect in that in the coming years UDC will diversity its key customer base as I expect LG Display, Konica Minolta, Everdisplay, BOE, Philips and LG Chem to start mass producing OLEDs soon.

On March 2014, Konica Minolta announced it developed the world's most efficient OLED lighting panel - at 131 lm/W. Only two months later, the Japanese company announced it developed an even more efficient panel at 139 lm/W.

Konica's new panel has an emitting area of 15 square centimeters, a lifetime of 55,000 hours (LT50) at a brightness of 1,000 cd/m² and a CRI of 81. The color temperature is 2857K.