As we noted last week LG Display (LPL) announced that they have reached the commercialization stage  of their blue OLED panels.  While these panels are not quite the final step in the blue saga, as they use a combination of blue fluorescent and blue phosphorescent material to achieve results, they are certainly a step toward the ultimate goal of a three color (RGB) phosphorescent stack (see our 5/1/25 note for more detail).  The development of this panel was conducted with Universal Display (OLED), who has been on the blue phosphorescent material development path for years and is the key supplier of red and green organometallic phosphorescent emitters to the entire OLED industry.

Why is blue so hard?
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Commercialization of a blue phosphorescent emitter and host combination that does not rely on blue fluorescent support has proved to be a daunting task due to the high energy associated with blue photons (packets of electromagnetic energy).  These excited particles can break chemical bonds in their own molecules, degrading them, or can create new non-radiative molecules that reduce the efficiency of the blue emitter.  Additionally, the host material that the blue emitter sits in has to have a higher energy level than the blue emitter itself to keep energy from leaking back to the host as heat or non-radiative energy.  So finding a blue phosphorescent emitter that meets all specifications is only part of the process, as the host material  development can also be challenging.
So, we know the development of a blue phosphorescent emitter has been difficult to say the least, as some potential blue emitter materials have high efficiency and a deep blue color point but only last for a few minutes, while others have a longer lifetime, and proper color, but are too inefficient to be used commercially, and some have excellent efficiency and a long lifetime but can’t quite produce the deep blue that is needed.  While Universal Display has completed ‘commercial verification’ with LG Display, UDC continued to record blue emitter/host revenue in 1Q as ‘developmental’, which is required until the product using the material is commercially available.  As the timeline for LGD’s panel production is still unknown, the key to understanding whether the LGD panels are being used in a commercial device will be when UDC begins recording the blue material as ‘commercial’.
What about Samsung?
Obviously, there are other OLED panel manufacturers working to bring a full phosphorescent blue emitter to market, particularly Samsung Display (pvt), who is also working with UDC along with their own development team.  As the leader in small panel OLED displays, they have a very big stake in this process but tend to be a bit more ‘purist’ when it comes to OLED processes.  SDC did not believe that LG Display’s TV panel, which uses a single color OLED and a color filter to create red, green, and blue, was the right way to produce large panel (TV) OLED in 2013 and concentrated on smaller RGB OLED displays, eventually settling on a blue OLED with quantum dot s to create colors for their QD/OLED TVs.
As the LG Display panel uses both fluorescent and phosphorescent blue emitters, we suspect that the current blue phosphorescent host/emitter that LGD is using as part of its stack might not meet Samsung Display’s requirements yet.  Samsung would likely be most interested in using blue phosphorescent material in mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) where the higher efficiency of a phosphorescent blue emitter will be key to either a power consumption reduction or an improvement in brightness, but as mobile devices have individual sub-pixels for each color, we expect their requirements might be a bit more stringent.  That said, we do expect SDC will find a way to incorporate a blue phosphorescent system in some product this year.  It could be a similar fluorescent/phosphorescent blue emitter base for their QD/OLED TV/Monitor panels, or it could be a higher specification deep blue phosphorescent emitter for an RGB architecture for mobile devices, but we find it difficult to imagine that SDC will cede the first ‘blue year’ to LGD.
All of that said, changing from a blue fluorescent emitter to a phosphorescent emitter is much more complicated than just switching materials.  In a large panel (TV), the OLED materials are deposited across the entire panel and the driving circuitry is the same for every sub-pixel point, as each sub-pixel is the same (white) color until it reaches the color filter or quantum dot.  In current RGB (small panel) displays, the driver for the red and green sub-pixel can be the same but as the driving characteristics for the fluorescent sub-pixel (blue) as different, the circuitry for the blue driver is different, adding to complexity.  In an all phosphorescent RGB display, all three sub-pixel circuits can be the same (in theory), which means not only does the material stack change, but the driver circuitry also changes, adding another level of complexity to designing an all phosphorescent display.
Timeline?
Not only do all of these issues need to be worked out, but they also need to be tested both at the pilot level and in a mass production setting, and this can take time.  The issue then becomes where do they start?  Does the OLED producer have enough ‘spare’ capacity that they can convert a line to producing all phosphorescent RGB OLED displays, or are they capacity constrained enough that they cannot afford to dedicate a line to all phosphorescent OLED production?  As was the case when green phosphorescent emitter material became commercially available, adoption took time.  With the first commercial product using a phosphorescent green emitter was released in 2013, UDC’s green emitter sales increased but then stayed relatively flat for ~15 quarters, being adopted by one of two major customers. In 2017, sales increased as a second large customer adopted the material and continued to grow quickly through 2021.  While still growing to a lesser degree, as the industry has universally adopted green phosphorescent emitter  material, growth is more tied to capacity expansion and new product applications, although the adoption of multi-layer OLED displays could lead to incremental material sales.
Adoption?
So the question now becomes will the adoption take 15 months, as it did with green or will it be faster or slower?  These are essential questions for UDC’s longer-term prospects, as while OLED capacity growth continues, the addition of a third primary material revenue stream is a godsend for any material producer.  We expect the adoption of blue will be faster, but with some caveats.
Why faster?
Numbers – in 2013 there were two OLED producers, Samsung Display and LG Display.  Tianma (000050.CH) built their first OLED fab that year but did not ship commercial product and BOE (200725.CH), China’s largest OLED producer, did not build their first OLED fab until 2016, so the adoption of green phosphorescent emitter material was dependent on only two producing entities.  Now there are over a dozen producers, all of whom are looking to differentiate their OLED displays from others and blue is a perfect differentiator.
Experience –Samsung Display and LG Display had been involved with OLED display development for over 10 years when green phosphorescent emitter material was released commercially by UDC, yet much OLED production was still problematic, and yield was always an issue.  At that time making major changes to formulas, architecture, processes, and equipment meant a long learning curve before returning to decent production yields and carrying substantial losses that could erode potential funding and adoption.  The current experience level across the industry is considerably higher than 10 years ago and producers are more likely to see a change that could give them an edge over the competition as one they are willing to take after years of managing commercial production.
Quality – A true blue phosphorescent emitter will give display designers a greater ability to balance their systems.  As a more efficient material they can maintain brightness with less power and less power means longer battery life for mobile users and a longer lifetime for the material, putting a damper on the ever-present burn-in question.  They can maintain the current power level and produce a brighter display to compete with other display modalities that are encroaching on the OLED space, or they can use blue as a differentiator that will separate their display from those without blue phosphorescent emitters.
Advertising – The idea of the display industry is to sell displays, and in order to sell displays there have to be lots of products that use them.  As the display industry can find itself in a somewhat stagnant position, with few new enticements for consumers, any new technology affords the industry a shot at incremental unit sales. We expect the industry will be enamored with the promotion of blue when it starts and will start a new line of promotion for OLED devices to counteract Mini-LED, Quantum Dots, and eventually Micro-LED displays.  However unless there is a truly discernable difference between all phosphorescent displays and what we have now, price will remain the most important factor to consumers as the blue enthusiasm wears down.  UDC however will have a new revenue stream , one that can eventually be bigger than red or green.
Why bigger?
In order to produce white light in large OLED displays, one can combine a blue emitter and a yellow/green emitter and then send the light to a color filter to create red, green, and blue sub-pixels, essentially the way LG Display’s WOLED TV panels work.  Samsung Display’s QD/OLED panel is similar but based on a blue[1] OLED material that gets converted to red and green by quantum dots. Smaller devices use individual red, green and blue sub-pixels, directly creating all colors.  WOLED displays uses UDC’s yellow/green phosphorescent emitter with a blue fluorescent emitter.  If a phosphorescent blue emitter became available, UDC would have the potential to be able to put both materials in every WOLED TV.  In Samsung’s QD/OLED the blue material used is fluorescent, with UDC providing no substantial OLED emitter material.  If a phosphorescent blue emitter became available, UDC would have that potential new stream.  In RGB display (phones, tablets) the impact would not be as significant as UDC would only be adding a third phosphorescent emitter to the two they already supply, but the volumes are extremely high, so all in, UDC benefits unless someone comes up with a better phosphorescent blue.  That said, even in that scenario UDC still has device patents that cover the use of phosphorescent emitters in OLED devices, so they might lose the OLED material sale to someone else but should still be able to capture a device royalty stream as before.
Why Not?
Cost – Fluorescent emitter materials tend to be less expensive than phosphorescent ones.  In premium OLED displays, the additional cost can be absorbed, but as one migrates to lower price tiers, the cost will be more difficult to absorb, and adoption will be slower.  We expect however that many brands will bite the bullet and eat the additional material cost in order to compete, at least for some products.  The cost of converting formulas, structure, and process also must be considered, and some who have been producing OLED displays for years at a loss might hesitate, unless they can convince funding sources to foot the bill.
Complexity – While there are certainly issues that will make adding phosphorescent blue to OLED production more complex, at least at the onset, OLED producers are so used to phosphorescent materials that they will likely adapt to required changes more quickly
 So?
We note also that UDC has contracts with all major OLED producers.  Some are based on a flat fee license, and some are based on a per unit royalty, and some cover only current phosphorescent (red & green) emitters.  In some cases UDC will have to strike new deals for blue that follow current contract formats.  While developmental OLED materials are expensive their volumes are low, but when they become commercial, they tend to be priced according to volume, so large, early adopters could have an advantage over small lower volume producers, unless their current contracts cover ‘all phosphorescent materials’.  UDC will have to balance their production cost and volume tiers against their desire to encourage blue adoption, ideally setting smaller price/volume increments in the early years against the opposite in later years. 
All in, blue is good, especially for those who produce it, but regardless of the headlines that are calling for a new ‘blue’ era in the display world, we expect most investors will expect too much too soon.  Panel producers need to make money and if they are producing at profitable utilization levels, they are going to want to keep doing so as long as possible, putting aside any changes that might reduce volume or profitability.  Most will talk the ‘blue’ talk but the implementation might be a bit less than the rhetoric.  We believe the adoption of blue phosphorescent emitter material will certainly be a positive for the industry and for the consumer, but technology hype is just that whether it is AI hype, metaverse hype, or 5G hype.  How consumers see ‘blue’ will be the deciding factor as it always is.


[1] Actually a combination of fluorescent blue and phosphorescent green.

Warning…Thinking Caps on…
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​In an OLED device, a voltage is applied to the cathode, creating electrons and the opposite electrode produces holes.  Think of them as the cute girl sitting at one end of the bar and the svelte guy sitting at the other end.  When they see each other, they are immediately attracted to each other (opposites attract) and both get up and push their way through the crowd (OLED stack).  They meet on the dance floor (emitting material) where the magic happens.  They hold each other in a warm embrace (forming an exciton, a combination of an electron and an electron hole that is in an excited state) and dance in the spotlight (produce light) until the music stops.  They gaze into each other’s eyes and quietly head back to their seats on either side of the bar.  OLED devices play out this scenario over and over as long as there is a voltage at the electrodes.

Simple enough, right?  Now let’s move this conceptual production to an industrial setting.  There are two companies in Pixeltown, both producing the same thing, excitons.  Fluorescent Inc. produces four excitons on each production run, One singlet exciton (red) and three triplet excitons (blue), but their process is old, and they are only able to sell the singlet excitons to customers, throwing away all of the triplets, leading to a 25% efficiency rating and a serious trash problem that the Pixeltown mayor is not happy about. Phosphorescent Inc. uses the same basic equipment and produces the same initial output of one singlet exciton and three triplet excitons.  However, the folks at Phosphorescent Inc hired some smart guys who came up with a way to get their triplet excitons to act like singlet excitons, which allows them to sell all three triplets and one singlet for each run, for a nearly 100% efficiency rating. 
Sooner or later the folks at Fluorescent Inc (Factory a) figured out that they are going to go out of business, having such a low efficiency rating, and the economic impact to Pixeltown would be catastrophic.   Management hired a hot-shot banker and put out  some feelers but there were no takers until the banker’s lowly assistant figured out that if you were to combine both fluorescent and phosphorescent materials together when making excitons, the result would be even better than the two individually. 
Here’s why.  If the materials are carefully matched, the ability of Phosphorescent Inc’s process to use both triplet and singlet excitons to produce light, allows some of the triplet excitons that Fluorescent Inc produces but throws away (heat rather than light), to become useful.  This means that the combined fluorescent and phosphorescent emitters could have an efficiency that is higher than 25% for the fluorescent excitons and remain at 100% for phosphorescent excitons, essentially improving the efficiency of the combination by about 15%.  Not all of the fluorescent triplet excitons can be converted and used by the phosphorescent emitter, but enough to make a difference.

Why is this important?
LG Display (LPL) made an announcement today that will undoubtedly shake up things in the OLED space, but the devil is in the details and it is essential to understand how OLEDs work in order to quantify the announcement.  In fact the structure that LG Display is speaking about is similar to the tandem system that the company uses for production of small OLED displays for ‘a large customer’.  Typically, in order to improve brightness, the dual stack approach is used, essentially squeezing two OLED stacks between electrodes instead of one.  This helps, but is an expensive solution as OLED materials, particularly phosphorescent emitters, are costly, especially if you are duplicating the entire (RGB) stack, and increases the number of steps involved in the deposition process, which has a tendancy to reduce yield.
We believe the LG Display approach is both similar in that it uses a multi-stack approach, but it is also a bit different.  We expect that the phosphorescent blue host and dopant combination that LGD is using  would not stand on its own commercially quite yet, as it could possibly fall short on a particular commercial specification, any of three major categories, lifetime, efficiency, or color point.  Developers must balance these three factors when trying to create a stable phosphorescent emitter and that has been a difficult task for all.  Materials that have the necessary color point (deep blue) might have a lifetime that is too short to use commercially or be lacking in efficiency (high power usage).  Other materials that have a more extended lifetime might not have the necessary color point.  You get the idea.  So while the concept of using a combination of blue phosphorescent and blue fluorescent emitters has promise, it is an interim solution until a truly stable blue emitter and host combination can be found. 
LG Display was careful to call this iteration ‘a step closer’ and not a final solution, but it will certainly get LG Display some acclaim and cachet from the announcement.  The response from Samsung Display (pvt) will be interesting to see as they have been working on the same blue phosphorescent emitter with Universal Display (OLED) for years and at one time, years agho, evaluated a combination blue Phosphorescent/Fluorescent combination.  We also expect a response from both the TADF community and those developing quantum dot EL displays. 
Here's the LG Display Press release: (our highlights in red)
LG Display, the world’s leading innovator of display technologies, announced today that it has become the world’s first company to successfully verify the commercialization-level performance of blue phosphorescent OLED panels on a mass production line. The achievement comes about eight months after the company partnered with UDC to develop blue phosphorescence and is considered a significant step closer to realizing a “dream OLED” display.
In the display industry, “dream OLED” refers to an OLED panel that achieves phosphorescence for all three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue). OLED panel light emission methods are broadly categorized into fluorescence and phosphorescence. Fluorescence is a simpler process in which materials emit light immediately upon receiving electrical energy, but its luminous efficiency is only 25%. In contrast, phosphorescence briefly stores received electrical energy before emitting light. Although it is technically more complex, this method offers luminous efficiency of 100% and uses a quarter as much power as fluorescence.
However, achieving blue phosphorescence has remained a major challenge even more than 20 years after the commercialization of red and green phosphorescence. This is due to blue, among the three primary colors, having the shortest wavelength and demanding the greatest energy.
LG Display has solved this issue by using a hybrid two-stack Tandem OLED structure, with blue fluorescence in the lower stack and blue phosphorescence in the upper stack. By combining the stability of fluorescence with the lower power consumption of phosphorescence, it consumes about 15% less power while maintaining a similar level of stability to existing OLED panels.
In particular, LG Display is the first to succeed in reaching the commercialization stage of blue phosphorescent OLED panels, where performance evaluation, optical characteristics, and processability on actual mass production lines should all be confirmed. The company has already completed commercialization verification with UDC.
LG Display has independently filed patents for its hybrid blue phosphorescent OLED technology in both South Korea and the United States.
The company will showcase a blue phosphorescent OLED panel featuring two-stack Tandem technology at SID Display Week 2025, the world’s largest display event, in San Jose, California from May 11th (local time).
At the show, LG Display will be unveiling a blue phosphorescent OLED panel featuring two-stack Tandem technology applied to a small and medium-sized panel that can be applied to IT devices such as smartphones and tablets. As more and more products require high definition and high efficiency such as AI PCs and AR/VR devices, the application of blue phosphorescence technology is expected to expand rapidly.
“The successful commercialization of blue phosphorescence technology, which has been called the final piece of the ‘dream OLED’ puzzle, will become an innovative milestone towards the next generation of OLED,” said Soo-young Yoon, CTO and Executive Vice President of LG Display. “We expect to secure a leading position in the future display market through blue phosphorescence technology.”
Based on LG Display’s IP here’s what we think the configurations might be… 

Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and BOE (200725.CH) are rivals, not quite directly but Samsung Electronics’ affiliate Samsung Display (pvt) competes head-to-head with BOE in the small panel display market and to a lesser degree in the large panel TV space.  As we have noted, Samsung Display has been at loggerheads with BOE over IP issues and after a recent partial win concerning BOE’s misuse of Samsung trade secrets and IP, Samsung Display continues to fight BOE in the courts.  That said, Samsung Electronics also has issues with BOE.  As the largest TV set producer, Samsung Electronics, requires that those who use “We supply to Samsung Electronics” in their advertising, pay a royalty.  In 2022 BOE, who was the second largest supplier of TV panels to Samsung in 2021, refused to pay and Samsung has reduced BOE’s share as a TV panel supplier considerably since that time as they continued to battle over the royalty situation.
It seems that the President of Samsung Electronics TV division is scheduled to visit China in the middle of May, and BOE officials are expected to visit Samsung in Korea, with both expected to try to negotiate an agreement between the two on both panel prices and royalties.  The idea is that BOE can either lower panel prices to compensate Samsung or can leave panel prices the same and pay the royalty. 
While this seems reasonable, it might not be to BOE, who is also a major supplier to LG Display (LPL), Samsung’s local rival.  LGD has recently sold it’s last LCD TV panel plant (Guangzhou, China) to Chinastar (pvt), also a supplier to both Samsung and LG (066570.KS).  The large panel product that was being purchased from the LGD Guangzhou fab before the sale, would now become purchases from Chinastar.  Samsung has an internal requirement that no supplier of key materials can represent more than 30% share, and that means that it will have to maintain that 30% restriction, keeping it from purchasing panels from the Guangzhou fab now under the Chinastar banner.  While there are other large panel producers, such as AUO (2409.TT), Innolux (3481.TT), HKC (248.HK), and CHOT (pvt) that Samsung already buys panels from, Samsung tends to go with suppliers that have large capacity, leading to a secure supply, without violating the share limit..
At least to a degree, this puts BOE in the catbird seat or at least gives it some room to negotiate with Samsung, as Samsung Display is out of the large panel LCD business and supplies only QD/OLED TV panels to its parent which make up only a small portion of Samsung’s TV panel needs.  This leaves Samsung Electronics to outsource all of its LCD TV panel purchases.  As they cannot increase purchases from Chinastar without overstepping their limit, BOE is the obvious choice if they can come to an agreement over royalties.

Samsung Display’s (pvt) QD/OLED display technology has faced some significant challenges.  Developed to bring Samsung Display into the large panel OLED business, which has been dominated by LG Display’s (LPL) WOLED panels, there seemed to be some skepticism from SDC’s parent Samsung Electronics (005930.KS).  We expect some of that skepticism came from low initial yields for QD/OLED, with Samsung needing a reliable source of high volume production before committing to the technology, but SDC persevered and refined production processes to more normalized yields.  Samsung Electronics adopted the technology in 2022 with 55” and 65” TV models, their first large panel OLED offerings since abandoning large panel OLED technology in 2013 and has maintained QD/OLED’s presence with additional sizes since then.  However with relatively limited production capabilities (~750,000 TV sets/year assuming 75% yield), Samsung seems to still be wary of relying solely on QD/OLED technology for its large panel OLED line and has purchased WOLED panels from LG Display to augment its large panel OLED offerings.
Quality does not seem an issue, in fact QD/OLED has been lauded for its color purity, color volume and higher peak brightness than WOLED displays, but despite these positive points parent Samsung still does not seem to have jumped into the QD/OLED pool deep-end and is offering both QD/OLED and WOLED (from LGD) to TV consumers, in some cases without disclosing which technology they are getting.  That said,  it seems that QD/OLED has found a home, and one that Samsung Electronics  seems to be in sync with; monitors, high-end monitors in particular.  Gamers, who look for high quality reproduction and rapid response time have been impressed with Samsung Display’s QD/OLED monitor product and a number of monitor brands have taken to QD/OLED for their flagship gaming monitors.
A quick look at Amazon (AMZN) or Best Buy (BBY) shows just under a dozen brands with at least one QD/OLED monitor offering, with sizes ranging from 27” to 49” and prices ranging from $589 to $1,285.  Considering that you can buy a 27” LCD monitor for under $100 and a 27” OLED monitor for under $500, QD/OLED monitors are certainly considered high-end, with most labeled ‘gaming monitors’ specifically.  Companies like MSI (2377.TT) and ASUS (2357.TT) offer quite a few QD/OLED models, along with more standard OLED and LCD models, while Samsung, maintains the lead, recently releasing the first 27” QD/OLED gaming monitor with a 500 Hz refresh rate (that unusually high refresh rate is particularly attractive to gamers who thrive on being able to see rapid screen movements without lag).  With this new high refresh rate QD/OLED monitor and other recent 27” QD/OLED entries, QD/OLED is expected to increase its share of the 27” OLED monitor market from 32% last year to 47% this year.
While OLED monitors overall are still a small part of the general monitor market, roughly between 1.4 and 1.5m units out of between 150m and 155m, over the last few years, QD/OLED has become the standard bearer for high-end gaming monitors, and their share of the OLED monitor market is expected to increase from 68% last year to 73% this year.  With  only one 30,000 sheet/month QD/OLED fab, SDC can either produce ~700,000 QD/OLED TVs or ~3m+ monitor panels.  With large panel OLED (TV) growth relatively slow and OLED monitor growth increasing, the likely higher per unit profitability on monitors than on TVs, it would seem that QD/OLED has found a new home.  With considerable room for QD/OLED technology improvement that can widen the gap between WOLED and QD/OLED, it seems a more comfortable home than the technology battles that rage between LCD, Mini-LED, QD, and WOLED in the TV space

China’s largest display producer BOE (200725.CH) and Korea’s largest display producer Samsung Display (pvt) are locked in a race to be the first to produce IT OLED panels on Gen 8.6 substrates.  Current production is done on existing Gen 6 OLED production lines, but with expectations that demand for OLED laptops and monitors will continue to increase, and the carrot of Apple’s (AAPL) slow but steady conversion of its mobile products to OLED, the race continues to escalate.  OLED It panels can and are produced by both (and others) on Gen 6 OLED lines, but the number of panels that can be produced on one substrate of Gen 8.6 glass is more than twice the number that can be processed on one Gen 6 substrate, so overall fab efficiency is higher for Gen 8.6.
Of course, the necessity for increasing OLED IT panel production volumes is based on demand, so both Samsung Display and BOE are making the bet that OLED IT volumes will continue to increase, although both are starting production at levels below the stated capacity of the fabs, and both stating that the expansion to full capacity will take place as the market continues to grow.  Some of this open-endedness comes from Apple, who has been thought to be adjusting its OLED transition plans due to weak market conditions, but when making long-term plans (fab equipment has a 5–7-year depreciation term in South Korea and a 7 year term in China) shorter -term factors carry less weight.
So how much does it cost BOE and Samsung Display to build out these new fabs?  SDC has the advantage of being able to reuse fab space that was previously used for large panel LCD production, so no greenfield cost, but lots of modifications for new equipment.  Samsung Display is using Canon (7751.JP) as a source for the deposition tools it is building its fab around, which are estimated to cost ~$400 million each (2 are needed for a 15k line) with another ~$100 million for vacuum chambers and logistical equipment that is tied to these tools, so the key equipment cost alone is over $600 million. 
BOE has selected Sunic Systems (171090.KS) to supply their deposition tools for an expected ~$500 million price tag (inclusive of associated equipment) so BOE will have a cost advantage.  This seems to have lit a fire under Samsung Display to beat BOE in being the first to mass produce IT OLED products on a Gen 8.6 platform, gaining the advantage of experience, a key to improving yield.  In that vein, SDC took delivery of its 1st (of two) Gen 8.6 OLED deposition tools about a year ago and has been refining the process and tool characteristics since the installation was completed.  The 2nd tool is expected to be delivered within the next 2 – 3 months.  SDC has stated that they expect to begin mass production in 2026, however more recently there have been indications that SDC is planning to begin mass production this year, likely putting at least the first (of two) lines about a year to 18 months ahead of BOE.
Again, the risk to both producers is how rapidly the market for OLED IT products develops and how much of that capacity can be produced on existing Gen 6 capacity.  In the table below we look at rough (very) shipments for OLED IT products in 2023 and 2024 and we note that it is estimated that Apple (iPad Pro) was responsible for at least half of the growth in OLED tablet shipments.  Given that there is a considerable amount of global Gen 6 capacity, even another year of strong unit growth could be covered by existing Gen 6 capacity, albeit a bit less efficiently, so the necessity for either SDC or BOE to begin production at these new facilities is less critical.  

​That said, much of the existing Gen 6 OLED capacity is unable (as it stands currently) to produce some of the more esoteric OLED stacks and backplane configurations that Apple seems to desire and are becoming the leading edge in IT OLED production technology, so we have to sub-divide  demand further into ‘advanced’ OLED IT and ‘regular’ OLED IT production, and that is where both SDC and BOE will really compete.  LG Display (LPL), who produces ‘Advanced’ OLED IT products on its Gen 6 OLED lines and has yet to announce plans for a Gen 8.6 OLED IT project, is also a competitor and one that has been qualified as a full-scale producer for Apple using its current Gen 6 fab, so things get even murkier when LG Display is put into the mix.
All in, SDC and BOE will duke it out for leadership in this new Gen 8.6 OLED IT category and will likely not get much out of the results for the first few years, while LG Display has the option of remaining a Gen 6 OLED IT player or stepping up to Gen 8.6 and incurring the risk of taking on a considerable financial burden and hoping that the market can support all three players quickly.  It is good that the industry is progressing in terms of its ability to efficiently produce OLED IT products, but the necessity for immediacy seems a bit harder to understand.  Samsung Display has always been the leader in RGB OLED production and as BOE is the masthead producer for the highly competitive Chinese display industry, neither seems to have much choice that to compete at this point, while LG Display will likely be the only profitable supplier of IT OLED for the next few years without the cost and depreciation of a new fab.  If it’s between 1st or 2nd place and losing money for the next few years and 3rd place and making money now, we go for the bronze.

​Samsung Display (pvt) has committed to OLED in a big way, ending its many years of large panel LCD production.  The company’s OLED focus has made it the leader in RGB panel production for smartphones, but as OLED became dominant in the small panel market SDC realized that it could not maintain it singular dominance in that space as competition from China increased.  To that end, SDC is building RGB Gen 8.6 capacity specifically designed for the production of larger OLED panels for IT products, such as tablets, monitors, and notebooks.  There are a number of manufacturing challenges that make this expansion more than just adding capacity as the deposition equipment has to be specially designed and processes have to be modified to make such a change, but as is typical of SDC, they are willing to take the risk to become the leader.
China’s leading panel producer BOE (200725.CH) understands that while it continues to produce large panel LCD displays, it must compete directly with SDC in this emerging space and has begun construction of its own Gen 8.6 OLED for IT fab and Visionox (002387.CH), a smaller Chinese OLD producer has begun the planning for OLED for IT capacity.  This leaves one major panel producer, LG Display (LPL), with no announced plans for such expansion, despite its close relationship with Apple (AAPL), who is expected to drive OLED IT demand as it transitions its product line to OLED over the next few years.
LG Display already produces OLED for IT panels on a Gen 6 line and was the first producer to develop the tandem display structure that Apple uses for the iPad, but it does this production on a Gen 6 line, which makes it less efficient than a Gen 8.6 line would be.  This has caused considerable speculation about why LG Display has not committed to building a dedicated Gen 8.6 OLED for IT line to compete with rivals SDC and BOE.  Much of the speculation was based on LG Display’s financial situation, which has been strained over the last few quarters, but with the sale of the company’s LCD fab in China, the pressure has lessened, and the assumption has been that LGD would commit to the new fab early this year.
It seems that this will not be the case if a story out of South Korea is correct, as it indicates that LG Display is actually preparing to do just the opposite.  Instead of adding Gen 8.6 OLED capacity, or adding additional Gen 6 OLED for IT capacity, the information suggests that LGD is actually planning to reduce its existing OLED for IT capacity and convert it to additional Gen 6 OLED capacity to produce iPhones.  The motivation for the change would seem to be Apple, who has seen relatively weak demand for the OLED iPad, which has led to lower utilization rates for LGD at its OLED for IT fab.  In response the story says that LGD wants to convert some of its Gen 6 OLED for IT capacity to iPhone capacity, as it expects to increase3 its iPhone production for Apple this year by almost 17%. 
Such a change would not be cheap as the new iPhone OLED line is expected to cost ~$1.36b US, after LGD spent almost $2.6b US to build the Gen 6 OLED for IT line.  It would also indicate that LG Display does not believe that the demand for OLED IT products will grow as quickly as some predict (OLED penetration into the IT market is expected to reach 2.8% this year and 5.2% next year), essentially betting on iPhone growth and its own ability to capture additional iPhone production share from SDC.  Given LGD’s relationship with Apple, and the fact that Apple has likely financed a portion of LGD’s Gen 6 OLED for IT fab construction cost with pre-payments, Apple would have to sign off on the plan, a tacit agreement as to the potential for a weaker demand picture for OLED for IT going forward.
All in, this is a major decision for LG Display if the story is true, and one that LG Display has been unable or unwilling to make while others have committed.  If LGD decides to reduce OLED for IT and that market takes off it will fall far behind its rivals.  If it reduces OLED for IT capacity and OLED IT demand is less than predicted it will have bypassed months or years of low utilization at a very expensive fab.  No pressure…

Samsung Display (pvt) is the leader in the foldable smartphone display market, while they were not the first to release a foldable display, the competitor that beat them is no longer in business.  That said, the number of OLED display producers and phone brands that are producing displays or offering foldable smartphones has increased considerably since the initial releases back in 2019, at which point there were two brands Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and Huawei (pvt).  While Motorola and others offer a number of models Samsung and Hiawei are still the volume (units) leaders and continue to battle to maintain (Samsun) or gain (Huawei) share in this relatively new market.

In September of 2024 Huawei released the Mate XT Ultimate, a tri-fold smartphone, that pushed the competitive envelope further.  Not to be outdone, it seems that Samsung has been discussing production plans with suppliers for its first tri-fold phone, which is expected to go into production in April.  While all components have not been finalized yet, scheduling is being discussed in order to make sure the components, a number of which are new, will be available to assemblers when necessary. It is expected that Samsung will produce `~200,000 units this year, an exceptionally small number compared to the 5m expected for this year’s Z Flip and Z Fold, which together represent less than 3% of Samsung’s smartphone shipments.  Samsung is also said to be developing a thinner version of the Z Flip 7 known as the Z Flip FE, a follow up to the Z Flip SE released this year, with total production, including previous models of ~7m units.
If Samsung is expecting to sell only 200,000 tri-fold smartphones this year, it indicates that Samsung is releasing the device in order to stay abreast of Huawei in terms of technology, but is less focused on generating sales, as both internal and external resources will be used  for the tri-fold device, potentially diluting the development of the higher volume Z Flip and Fold.  This comes at a time when the high price of foldable smartphones is slowing the segment’s growth and narrowing the customer base.  It is understandable that Samsung and others feel the need to complete by, at the least, matching existing technology, but the point of selling smartphones is to make money, which means the focus of any foldable device development program should be to bring down the price, rather than releasing a device to maintain bragging rights.
Samsung’s tri-fold device is expected to be just under 10” when open, while the Huawei device is 10.1” and the Z Fold FE is 10.6mm when folded while Chinese brands are between 9mm and 10mm when folded, so Samsung is not ‘breaking through’ specifications with its devices, it is just keeping pace.  With the relatively poor sales of the Z Fold SE (<100,000 units cumulative), this game is not bringing in new, high-volume customers, its saving face.  Instead of putting out a ‘me too’ product, we believe Samsung would be far better off skipping the tri-fold smartphone and working toward a 4-segment device, which would take a 6” (diagonal smartphone and create an unfolded display almost 6” high and 10.6” wide.  Yes, it would need four hinges and would be about 13mm thick, or slightly over ½ inch when folded, but it would open to the size of a medium to large size tablet.  Forget the copy and take a step ahead.

The rivalry between South Korean panel producers (Samsung Display (pvt) and LG Display (LPL)) and Chinese panel producers has been ongoing for a number of years as Chinese producers have pushed South Korean producers out of the large panel LCD business.  As it became obvious that Chinese producers had the advantage of significant government construction and operating subsidies, South Korean producers began shifting from LCD display production to OLED production, a relatively new technology at the time.  While Chinese large panel producers eventually won the battle for LCD display domination, South Korean producers went on to establish OLED as a higher quality technology, particularly for small panel displays.  Not to be outdone, Chinese panel producers have been building OLED capacity to challenge South Korean dominance in the OLED space, and while there are a multitude of CE brands that use OLED displays, the top of that list is Apple (AAPL).
Apple’s transition from LCD to OLED starting with the iPhone X, released om November 3, 2017, is expected to continue for the next few years as they migrate much of their product line to OLED.  Samsung Display and LG Display have been the primary small panel OLED suppliers to Apple but are continuingly being challenged by China’s largest panel producer BOE (200725.CH), who has made some inroad with Apple, supplying replacement displays for earlier iPhones and as a 3rd supplier for some later models.  While BOE has had its own issues with Apple, they continue to challenge SDC and LGD, along with a number of smaller Chinese OLED producers, and SDC has gone to the US ITC alleging patent infringement, with BOE, and other Chinese OLED producers (Chinastar (pvt), Tianma (000050.CH), and Visionox (002387.CH)) responding by challenging the validity of those patents in US Patent Court.
As the ITC investigation continues (target date 3/17/25) the patent challenges also continue, and the US Patent Review Board has ruled on one of the 4 patents that Samsung claims were infringed upon.  The ‘683’ patent, filed by Samsung Display on 11/13/17 in the US and 3/6/12 in Korea makes 15 claims concerning OLED pixel structure, particularly Samsung’s ‘diamond’ pixel structure shown on the left side of  Figure 1.  The PTAB has decided that 10 of the 15 claims made in the original patent are not valid, while leaving 5 intact.  Samsung will have the opportunity to appeal that decision. 
Limiting the broad scope of a patent is not an unusual outcome in patent review cases, but narrowing the patent will also narrow the ITC’s investigation scope, making SDC’s case a bit harder, and could open one of the other patents included in the investigation to further scrutiny as it is essentially a continuation of the ‘683’ patent mentioned above.
All in, the validity of the ‘shape’ characteristics of the pixels (polygon, Octagon, or non-quadrilateral) as specified in the ‘683’ patent, remain in effect, which is a key point in terms of the infringement, but spacing between pixels, size, and arrangement, the other ‘683’ claims, are invalidated, reducing the points that SDC can cite in the ITC investigation.  We expect SDC will appeal the PTAB decision, but this ruling and any potential appeal will likely push out the final ITC decision and the battle for OLED supremacy will continue in both the consumer space and the courts for another year.  That’s how lawyers put their kids through college.

[Note: The US Patent Office considers a patent unpatentable when the difference between claimed subject matter and prior art would have been obvious at the time of invention by a person having ordinary skill in the art to which subject matter pertains, where ‘ordinary skill’ means a degree in electrical engineering, material science, physics, or similar disciplines, along with 2 years of professional experience working with display design, including OLED displays or an equivalent level of skill, knowledge, or experience.]

​There are many ways to produce OLED displays. Small OLED displays can be produced using a red, green, and blue stripe to produce a pixel that can reproduce millions of colors. Some create small OLED displays by patterning RGB OLED material dots in a variety of configurations, each with its own positives and negatives, but large OLED displays, such as those for TVs or monitors are another story.  LG Display stacks a number of OLED materials on top of each other across the entire TV and uses a color filter to create colored sub-pixels.  Samsung Display does something similar, but uses different OLED materials and then uses quantum dots to convert the light into colors.
While the techniques for creating small and large OLED displays are different, they both have to compete with other display technologies, particularly LCD and its more recent kin, Mini-LED TV.  OLED TVs tend to have richer colors and higher contrast than LCD TVs but they tend to be less bright than LCD TVs, and are more expensive to produce, so large panel OLED producers are always looking for ways to improve brightness.  There are micro-lenses that can be used to pull more light from the display and dozens of other techniques that will work toward improving brightness, but the most important focus for improving large panel OLED display brightness are the emitting materials themselves.
OLED material producers are constantly working to improve characteristics, and while new OLED materials with better characteristics are always being developed, brightness improvements are often a tradeoff against material lifetime or color accuracy and cost, yet the competitive nature of the display business forces OLED display producers to keep making improvements to counter the competition.  One way of doing such is to use more OLED material.  LG Display’s original WOLED displays were formed of three stacks of OLED materials in layers.  Each stack was composed of blue and yellow/green emitters.  That combination produced white light, which was then passed through a color filter of red, green, and blue phosphors, each removing the opposing colors.  The prolem with this method is that it is subtractive and results is considerably less light reaching the viewer.
Over time a red emitter was added to the stacks to improve the quality of the white light, but in order to maintain brightness after the color filter, a blank space is left on the color filter, allowing a white sub-pixel to be added to each pixel.  While this improved the overall brightness, it also washed out some of the colors.  LG Display has now decided to add a fourth stack to its upcoming displays by separating some of the emittercolors in the stacks into there own stacks.  This concept adds additional emitter material, which adds to the light outrput (brightness) and allows for more control over the ‘tuning’ of each layer.
Samsung Display (pvt) has a different method for producing large panel OLED displays.  They coat the entire panel with OLED emitter materials, in the same way LGD does, but the combination of materials produces blue light rather than white light.  The blue light is passed to red and green quantum dots, which shift the blue light to red and green, and  a space allow the blue light to pass through unchanged.  While there is some loss from the qualntum dot conversion, they convert rather than filter, so a white pixel is not needed and the colors tend to be truer.
That said, LCD displays are based on backlights and OLED displays are self-generating, so regardless of the method used, OLED displays tend to be less bright, and driving them harder with a higher current just reduces their lifetime, so Samsung Display is doing the same thing as LG Display and adding an additional stack of blue  light generating OLED material to its QD/OLED displays, starting with its smaller OLED monitors.  Consumers will benefit from the extra stacks from both producers, as will the OLED material suppliers, although the uptake will not be overnight, however the bigger question will be how the additional stack will affect the price of the displays.  OLED emitter materials are expensive so we expect producers will have to eat the cost at the onset, but if the concept of adding stacks makes enough difference that consumers are more comfortable with OLED, than it will be worth the cost.  We expect the answer will take at least a year to surface, and while the idea of adding stacks might seem nuanced to the average user, if it is able to increase the brightness of an OLED display by 20% or 25%, it will make a big difference in the battle between OLED and LCD over time.