Universal Display Corp. Message Board

Maybe somebody taking a position ahead of the Society of Information Display conference next week? It is the biggest display conference of the year and I expect PANL should put out a press release Friday or Monday.

The only oddity would be that PANL's participation in the conference is the smallest that I can remember. They have only one presentation and it is on lighting. Samsung has also scaled back their participation as well though LG looks like they will be presenting quite a bit of info on their 55" OLED televisions.

Slacker

Unless Sid was just talking about Samsung, his numbers for the emitters arent in the "ballpark". PANL sold $9 million in emitters during the quarter. Some of the emitter might have been yellow, but they have said that that they classify that as green since they are so similar...and there is no way that they sold $3 million in blue emitters.

and if he was just talking about Samsung, then the host number doesnt make sense.

It is vapour deposition so PANL isnt collecting anything on the manufacturing equipment.

I dont want an IR person on the call, I want one to give them an idea about investor reactions and to communicate after the call with the analysts to clear up any misunderstandings. The fact that they made substantially new comments about the volume discount during the JPM presentation shows that they were clueless about the possible reaction to the red shortfall. They did a terrible job of framing the situation.

I agree about the strength of the questions.

I took the answer to mean that the discount would end. I'll relisten, but my first take was that the pricing schedule applied to each new molecule. So the green molecule starts at the top of the pricing schedule and a new red emitter would as well. Perhaps that is too optimistic, so I'd like to hear how others interpret the comments.

I didnt understand the comments about revenues from barriers. I dont think he mentioned material revenues. Equipment revenue is ok, but it isnt recurring though of course, the IP would be.

I think PANL's guidance is based on the same reports that we see about Samsung's capacity builds. They gave the guidance at the end of February so my guess is that it was only based on the fab ramp of A2P4 (then called A2E). The A2P5 ramp is new (24K in the 4th quarter) and I have seen reports of a A2P6 in early 2014.

At a minimum, I think that Samsung's capacity plans for the 1st quarter of 2014 are ahead of what was on the table at the beginning of the year.

Did PANL really say or imply that green was unlikely to be bigger than red this year? I must have missed that.

Did they really say or imply that we shouldnt expect green to be larger than red for the year?

I'm not sure I expect it, but I missed them giving any clues in this direction.

I think we also need to try and come up with an estimate of green sales to LG. I think that number was more significant than I would have projected.

$4.6 million in green emitter sales! If that was March alone, it is unbelievable.

Green emitter sales dont look bad...up $3.1 million YoY, which means that green emitters are already at least a third of emitter sales. OTOH, red emitter sales were down YoY due to a price cut and greater efficiency at Samsung.

The question is how many S4's did Samsung buy material for? At 10 million, the green emitter numbers look great. If it is 20 million (and that seems huge), they are much closer to being in line with PANL's 1 to 1 to 1 projection.

There is a pic from Anandtech that indicates the 25% power improvement is due to materials.

The Macquerie figure looks like they are just trying to show what a hexagonal structure would look like. That had been already rumored in a Digitimes article from the previous week.

As for the CES rumor, I posted a link on siliconinvestor to a web archive of the original anandtech article. The writer never got close enough to the display to tell whether it was Pentile or not. Unless this display was shown in 2012, I dont think there was ever any real info on the display matrix.

It wont be the first time it has happened in my investment life, but I will be very very surprised if the S4 does not have PANL's green.

The source was definitely Anandtech, and as far as I can tell, they never mention Pentile. OTOH, they did specifically show a comparison between two OLED's indicating a 25% power savings that was due to materials.

Did I miss a report that there was a version of this display that was non-Pentile? The 2nd hand reports I found of the original Anandtech info indicate that it was unknown whether that display was Pentile or not.

As for the power savings, here is a quote from a DB conference on Sep 12, 2012.

"What they get by adding green phosphorescence emitter is about another 15% to 20% less power utilization in the device. So it would then extend the battery but it is an incremental 15% to 20% power savings on the screen and your screen uses anywhere between 60% and 80% of your battery depending on your utilization."

If you look above the display power consumption table in the displaymate article, there is a graph that shows the spectral pattern for each of the displays. The reds are identical on the S3 and S4 but the green has definitely shifted. I cant say for certain that it is a phosphorescent green, but most signs point to yes. You are right though that all of the power savings would then come from green and it seems like there should have been further gains from other aspects of the system.

One other question would be whether the 29cd/A figure for red was achieved using a red host from PANL. We know that PANL has yet to sell that commercially.

Slacker

The big question I am hoping is answered is the ratio of red to green to green host. Is PANL's estimate of a 1 to 1 to 1 ratio for revenue accurate? It goes against all of the analyst reports we have read about the size of the green host market as well as the technical reports indicating that more green emitter is needed than red emitter.

So to add to Sidney's posts.

A1 is Samsung's Gen 4 fab.

A2 is Samsung's Gen 5.5 fab

A3 is the proposed Gen 6 or Gen 8.5 fab. If it is a Gen 8.5 fab, then it is definitely for televisions. A Gen 6 fab might be for televisions or tablets.

Each fab is built out in phases (lines). Most of Samsung's capacity comes from their A2 fab. They have built out 3 phases so far but there are rumors that Phases 4, 5, and 6 orders have been placed with capacity coming on line starting in the 2nd half of the year. It is hard to get firm numbers, but I think the three new phases would add somewhere around 60% to Samsung's existing Gen 5.5 capacity.

Slacker

It sounds like A2 Phase 4, 5, and 6 are going ahead. The big question is the timing of the A3 fab and whether it is Gen 6 or Gen 8.5. It seems like most recent rumors have been pointing to Gen 6.

Absolutely awesome news.

Doug, you should send this to your contacts at PANL. Worth working into the conference call.