According to the Nikkei Asian Review, Sumitomo Chemical plans to invest 20 billion yen (about $165 million USD) to increase its OLED touch panel production capacity at its Pyeongtaek factory by 40%. The new production line will be able to produce touch panels on glass substrates - and also on plastic ones for bendable displays.

Sumitomo's current capacity enables it to produce around 200 million touch panels per year for OLED displays specifically, supplying panels mainly for Samsung Display. Sumitomo is expecting a rapid expansion of the OLED market and is getting ready to increased OLED touch panel demand.

Universal Display and Sumitomo Chemical signed an OLED Technology License Agreement. UDC granted Sumitomo license rights to manufacture and sell solution-processed OLED lighting products. The agreement runs for the life of Universal Display’s relevant intellectual property rights.

Sumitomo aims to use UDC's technologies to increase the efficacy of their PLED lighting panels. The company will "explore business opportunities in lighting applications that take their printed polymer OLED technology to the next generation lighting.

Kateeva and Sumiomo Chemical announced a non-exclusive key partnership to pair Sumitomo's PLED materials to Kateeva's YieldJet OLED ink-jet printing platform. The two companies hope this collaboration will lead to adoption of P-OLED inkjet printing by OLED TV makers.

Kateeva and Sumitomo will cooperate to co-develop high-quality reference data for customers, which will be optmized to Kateeva's platform and Sumitomo's inks.

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Following is a sponsored post from Smithers Apex:

Smithers Apex (with the OLED Association) announced the agenda and lineup for the OLEDs World Summit 2014 conference. LG Display, Novaled, BASF, Acuity Brands Lighting, Konica Minolta, DuPont Displays, Panasonic, Visionox, BOE, Philips Lighting and many more of the industry’s most influential players in OLED lighting and displays will be presenting at the event.

The 16th annual event will take place September 16-18 at the Claremont Hotel Club & Spa in Berkeley, CA. Smithers Apex says that the OLEDs World Summit is the longest-running, preeminent business development and technical event dedicated exclusively to the OLEDs industry - connecting researchers with customers and manufacturers in both the lighting and display sectors.

A report from Japan suggests that Panasonic decided to withdraw from the OLED TV business as production costs are too high for the Japanese company. According to the report, Panasonic hopes to sale its OLED business to Japan Display (an agreement is expected next month).

This report is not confirmed yet. It is rather surprising as Panasonic's OLED business is focused on TV panels, while Japan Display is producing small/medium displays. In the past few years, Panasonic focused on printing technologies using Sumitomo's PLED materials.

Sumitomo Chemical announced it will exhibit its latest polymer OLED (PLED) lighting at the Light+Building 2014 event next month.

Sumitomo will exhibit a PLED installation called OLED Cosmos, designed by Motoko Ishii. This installation will use new dual-color OLED panels. These panels (produced using printing technologies) use two distinct colors.

Universal Display announced that the European Patent Office (EPO) revoked one of the company's basic phosphorescent OLED patents, EPO #1449238. The opposing parties included Sumitomo Chemical, Merck and BASF. This is one of more than 60 patents issued worldwide that cover four early fundamental phosphorescent OLED inventions developed at Princeton University and the University of Southern California.

UDC's CEO, Steven Abramson, said that they believe the EPO's decision is erroneous and they may file a petition to review the matter. In addition, UDC has a pending divisional EP patent application in which it intends to pursue substantial patent coverage that is similar to that provided in related patents that have previously been issued in the other jurisdictions. In any case, the company believes that any one decision in any one jurisdiction will not have a material effect on their business.

Sumitomo Chemical announced it has developed a new PLED inkjet-printing technology that achieves 423 PPI on glass substrates sized 370x470 mm. We don't have more information about Sumitomo's new production process, but apparently it isn't ready for commercialization yet as the company says they will "continue to improve the performance and process of PLED materials".

Panasonic printed P-OLED 56-inch OLED prototype

Panasonic used Sumitomo's PLED materials in their 56" 4K2K printed OLED TV prototype shown at CES 2013. Panasonic and Sumitomo has been collaborating on OLED TVs since 2009. The companies hope that ink-jet printing will enable them to lower the production costs of OLED panels compared to evaporation based production. Panasonic aims to launch their first OLED TVs in 2015. The company is collaborating with Sony, and may setup a production-JV together (although if this happens, it's not clear which production technology will be used).

Sumitomo Chemical unveiled new flexible PLED lighting panels. These structured panels (they have a patterned printed on them) are produced in an ink-jet printed process. Sumitomo showed several lamp prototypes, including the one shown below:

Sumitomo plans to start volume production of such panels by March 2015 (fiscal year 2014) - using both ink-jet and roll-to-roll processes. They still need to extend the lifetime of their panels, improve the luminance performance and improve their production yield rates.