April 21st, 2017

Tianma LTPS/OLED fab to start production

Shanghai based Tianma Microelectronics (000050.CH) will begin production at its new Gen 6 OLED fab as of today, according to the company.  The fab, which is in Wuhan, China is a Gen 6 two phase project that was started in January 2016, and has the gross capacity of 30,000 sheets/month when fully built-out, which we believe will be in late 2018.  While the fab is now ‘lit’, meaning the line is operational, we do not expect much in the way of actual commercial production until the end of this year at the earliest, as while Tianma has considerable experience in the production of small panel LCD displays, it has little experience in small panel OLED display production.  The fab also produces LTPS backplanes, which can be used for both LCD and OLED displays, so the near-term production could be oriented more toward LTPS until the OLED lines are optimized.  Tianma also has a gen 4.5 OLED pilot line which has been in operation for a number of years.
While the company showed typical conformed/flexible OLED displays at the lighting event, we believe the new fab is based on rigid substrates, and flexible OLED demos are being produced on the pilot line, which is the case for most other ‘flexible’ OLED producers.  Tianma holds a relatively small share of gross industry capacity (1.2%) but holds an 8% share of worldwide LTPS capacity and a 3.6% share of worldwide small panel capacity.  Tianma is a significant provider of LCD panels ranging from 19” to 1.25: to Chinese CE and industrial brands.

The evaporator crew at Tianma G6 - Source: Ofweek

Tianma flexible display demo - Source: Tianma