Universal Display Corporation announced that it will acquire an OLED patent portfolio from Merck, for $50 million. The OLED portfolio has an average remaining lifetime of approximately 10 years, and it includes more than 300 issued and pending patents worldwide, covering more than 110 unique patent families in the field of advanced OLED emissive device structures and related material components.
Merck says that this sale aligns with its strategy to focus on charge transport and triplet host materials, rather than emissive OLED materials. The closing of the transaction is expected in January 2026.
This is second time that UDC buys OLED patents from Merck, the first time being in 2023. The 2023 portfolio included over 550 issued and pending patents around 172 patent families with an average lifetime of 10 years, and represents over 15 years of R&D. Back in 2023, the two companies also entered into a multi-year collaboration agreement, in which the two companies will create advanced PHOLED stacks based on UDC's OLED green and yellow emitters and Merck's transport and host materials. Beyond its internal R&D, UDC also acquired patents from Motorola, BASF and Fujifilm.
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