Universal Display Expects 2019 Debut of First Foldable OLED Smartphones

OLED technology and materials supplier Universal Display expects the “long-awaited introduction” of the world's first foldable OLED smartphones to come next year, said CEO Steve Abramson on a Thursday earnings call. Their debut will “pave the cutting-edge and innovative form-factor path” for portable to foldable to rollable OLED, “exciting and enlarging the consumer electronics industry with new applications and new markets,” he said. Though Universal’s “top three” panel-maker customers, BOE, Samsung Display and LG Display, “are all working on flexible substrates,” Abramson expects Samsung will be one of the early market leaders in foldable OLED products, he said, citing last month’s Samsung Display announcement that its “unbreakable flexible” smartphone panel was “officially verified” in UL durability and drop tests. Corning CEO Wendell Weeks was significantly more pessimistic on an earnings call last month, saying no cover materials yet exist for a “truly” foldable smartphone (see 1807250008). Display Supply Chain Consultants CEO Ross Young recently agreed, telling a June webinar that technical challenges abound in commercializing foldable displays that are robust enough to withstand the “strain and stress” of repeated foldings (see 1806120029). Universal thinks it’s making “excellent” progress “in our ongoing development work for a commercial phosphorescent blue emissive system" that all its OLED panel-making customers “are waiting for,” said Abramson. As has been Abramson's custom on recent calls and at investor conferences, he declined in Q&A to speak more specifically about Universal's progress in blue. “We haven't disclosed specs on blue for quite some time,” he said. “We're making significant progress” in perfecting emissive-blue’s “color-point efficiency and lifetime, all in one device, and we believe we are significantly ahead of anybody else,” he said. Universal plans next month to install a “pilot prototype system” for the organic vapor-jet printing technology it’s developing to enable the more cost-efficient production of large-screen OLED TV displays, said Abramson: “We are making advancements with this novel mask-less, solvent-less dry direct printing technology.”