Ever since LCD displays came to dominate the living room, the desktop and mobile communications, new technologies claiming superiority over LCD have made their pitches. Most have failed. Plasma displays (PDPs) and electrophoretic displays (EPDs) made waves for a while, but (at best) have become niche technologies. By contrast, OLEDs have made market inroads, but their success has mainly been on the supply side where Samsung – a force to be reckoned with in the mobile phone space – has adopted OLEDs as its primary mobile display technology. NanoMarkets can, however, find little evidence that consumers themselves are jumping up and down with excitement about OLEDs. So the big question for the OLED makers is whether (1) OLEDs will go the way of PDPs and EPDs or if (2) there is something genuinely new and exciting to be had in OLED technology. NanoMarkets is firmly in the second camp and thinks that the OLED sector will generate $3.7 billion in materials alone by 2019. OLEDs are not only a display technology but also a lighting technology, and this “dual-use” aspect of OLEDs will ultimately “save” OLEDs from the fate of PDPs and EPDs.

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How OLED Lighting Could “Save” the OLED Industry
Ever since LCD displays came to dominate the living room, the desktop and mobile
communications, new technologies claiming superiority over LCD have made their
pitches. Most have failed. Plasma displays (PDPs) and electrophoretic displays
(EPDs) made waves for a while, but (at best) have become niche technologies.
By contrast, OLEDs have made market inroads, but their success has mainly been
on the supply side where Samsung – a force to be reckoned with in the mobile
phone space – has adopted OLEDs as its primary mobile display technology.
NanoMarkets can, however, find little evidence that consumers themselves are
jumping up and down with excitement about OLEDs.
So the big question for the OLED makers is whether (1) OLEDs will go the way of
PDPs and EPDs or if (2) there is something genuinely new and exciting to be had
in OLED technology. NanoMarkets is firmly in the second camp and thinks that
the OLED sector will generate $3.7 billion in materials alone by 2019. OLEDs are
not only a display technology but also a lighting technology, and this “dual-use”
aspect of OLEDs will ultimately “save” OLEDs from the fate of PDPs and EPDs.
How OLED Displays Fail to Compete
NanoMarkets continues to believe that the unwavering support of Samsung will
prove critical in determining the long-term success of OLEDs. And we note also
that Samsung is not alone. Other firms have made substantial investments in
OLED mobile displays – AUO obviously springs to mind, although Samsung
remains the big guy on the block. Most observers expect Chinese firms to be a
force to reckoned with in the OLED space and Chinese firms, BOE and Visionox,
are already making their presence felt.
However, for this level of support to continue or increase, OLED display makers
will have to see some of the purported advantages of OLEDs quickly become
market realities. To date progress in this regard has been equivocal. Consider
where OLEDs are today both in terms of consumer acceptance and their appeal to
the display industry.
OLEDs and the consumer pitch: NanoMarkets’ sense of the market is that the
OLED display industry’s messaging to consumers hasn’t quite worked:

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• The next iPhone (sans OLEDs) will surely attract long lines outside Apple
stores. There will be no queuing for the next Samsung AMOLED phone; if
there are lines, it won’t be because of the AMOLEDs.
• A few years back, when AMOLEDs first became widely used in cell phones
there was a PR surge touting the thinness and vibrant colors of OLED displays.
NanoMarkets impression is that this did not win the hearts and minds of large
numbers of purchasers.
• OLED TVs, despite recent price reductions (they are down to about $3,500)
don’t seem to be selling well either. They are not well positioned to compete
against what an LCD 4K system can offer.
• NanoMarkets is impressed technically with the latest transparent and flexible
OLEDs, but it is going to take some marketing genius to transform these into
a viable mass-market product. For example, so far what can be done with a
flexible display – miniature readouts on the side of the phone, or curved form
factors, for example – don’t seem likely to create a new generation of mobile
communications, just mere novelties.
Costs and engineering: NanoMarkets believes that once the first onslaught of
active matrix OLEDs failed to produce a big consumer response, OLED makers
turned their attention to cost and engineering advantage; benefits that can be
proven objectively unlike the aesthetic appeal of OLEDs to consumers.
At present, the conventional wisdom seems to be that the engineering/cost
advantages are what are supposed to increase the market share of OLEDs going
forward. The intrinsic cost benefits associated with OLEDs including (1) no need
for backlights and (2) potential for solution processing, which is less costly than
vapor deposition.
We think that claims of such engineering/cost benefits are convincing in abstract
terms, but they certainly have yet to make a dramatic difference. Consider:
• Are OLED phones that much lower in price or that much more profitable than
LCD phones?
• And after many years of talk, solution processed OLEDs are still just getting
going.

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NanoMarkets’ latest market research suggest that today 98 percent of OLEDs are
still vapor deposited and that this ratio will still be around 80 percent by 2019. So
while the advantages of solution processing are obvious to most observers, no
insiders really expect solution processing to make its impact felt fast.
What we will need to see happen here is manufacturing innovation from the OLED
makers themselves. Samsung would be the obvious place to look for this, but we
think LG may ultimately play an important role. Efforts by the materials
manufacturers will also be important – UDC immediately springs to mind here, but
we should also remember that some very big Asian and European specialty chem
firm produce OLED materials. These firms include Idemitsu Kosan, Nippon Steel,
Sumitomo Chemical and Mitsubishi Chemical
OLED Lighting as a Driver for the OLED Display Industry
Looking at the analysis above, it is hard to resist the conclusion that OLED
technology has much going for it, but if it were not for the powerful backing of
Samsung might not be doing that well in the marketplace. In the display market
there were CRTs then there were LCDs. Other display technologies – despite
some positives – haven’t survived for long. One might easily become convinced
that OLEDs – sans Samsung -- would be headed down the same path.
But unlike PDPs and EPDs, OLED are also a lighting technology and lighting is
different. Unlike the various technologies that have been proposed for displays,
different lighting technologies have always co-existed. Incandescent, halogen,
fluorescent and LED lighting continue to be sold (incandescent bulbs are still widely
sold outside of developed nations). So a new lighting technology does not have
the uphill battle that a new display technology has.
Given the technological diversity of the lighting space it may mean that OLEDs
stand a better chance of making it in the lighting world than in the display world. A
year ago, such a statement might have seemed cavalier. Yes, OLED lighting was
available but in the form of luxury lighting. It could cost thousands of dollars for an
OLED chandelier and the chandelier would be sold only by the most exclusive
retailers. The recent image of OLED lighting has also been colored in by the fact
that originally GE led to believe that moderate cost OLED lighting would be
available as early as 2012. But GE wasn’t able to carry out its promise and seems
to have dropped out of the OLED lighting space.
Until this year, OLED lighting was in very small quantities and mostly from pilot
lines. But this has all changed since Konica Minolta announced that it was building

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a full-scale production line for OLED lighting with a production capacity of a million
panels per month. This a serious commitment and when one considers that LG
Chem, Philips and other “tier one” electronics and lighting firms are also edging
towards producing OLED lighting products in quantity, it may be that the day of
OLED lighting is just around the corner
The point we are making here is not that OLEDs may be best suited to the lighting
market, although this may also be true. Rather, what we are saying is that OLEDs
may gain a foothold in the lighting market, where the competition is not so fierce
as in the display sector and this will then help OLEDs in the display sector. We
also note that OLED performance requirements are somewhat lower in the lighting
space than in the display space, so the barriers to success, yet again, are lower in
lighting than in displays.
NanoMarkets therefore foresees a scenario in which OLED lighting takes off in the
lighting space which then reverberates in the form of greater success for OLED
displays through displays inheriting experience curve effects in the lighting space.
We notice, in particular, that OLED office lighting will certainly provide a kinder
gentler market for large panel OLEDs compared to those difficult-to-make OLED
TVs.
The materials for this paper were drawn from the following NanoMarkets reports:
 OLED Materials Markets 2014
 OLED Lighting Markets 2014
Please visit www.nanomarkets.net for additional details