You’re the largest maker of glass for liquid-crystal displays on the planet, and your business is a fast car on a smooth highway.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer

Well, maybe there are a few bumps on that highway. As good as the display-glass business is for Corning, its proceeds have to support the optical fiber and communications part of the company. (Although optical fibers aren’t the disaster they used to be, they’re still not adding much to the bottom line.) And the big Asian LCD makers who are your customers are the prisoners of a business model that requires them to produce products with continually improving quality at continually declining cost. That means they are always pressuring you to reduce your prices to them.

But the business is still a good one, good enough so that your Asian and European competitors are motivated to invest in new and expanded manufacturing facilities. Still, this can be regarded as business as usual in the display industry, and you have learned that business well. Your car is fast, and the highway is pretty smooth.

But now you see a small speck in your rear-view mirror. It’s not a competing glass maker; it’s a new display technology that’s about to roll out with significant volume: active-matrix OLED (AMOLED). Not that there’s any appreciable volume of product out there today, but Samsung SDI (as discussed in this space in a March 23rd column) will begin production of AMOLED cell-phone displays at the end of this year, ramping up to 20M displays per year in 2006 and 100M in 2008. And Samsung’s Lee Woo-Jong was talking about 40-inch TVs "in two or three years" - an attention-getting statement, even if it struck us as overly optimistic.

So perhaps you look at DisplaySearch’s data that predicts OLED display revenue will grow from US$518M in 2005 to US$5.11B (yes, billion) in 2009, and you think, "If this AMOLED speck is going to gain on me, I want to own it."

And that’s just what Peter Bocko, Corning Display Group’s divisional VP, seemed to be saying in an interview in New York on Friday with EE Times’ Spencer Chin. Bocko said that Corning was in early-stage R&D of glass compositions optimized for polysilicon OLEDs. Coincidently - or perhaps not - this is the same OLED technology Samsung SDI will be ramping up early in 2007.

"I have seen some polysilicon panels that are outstanding," Bocko said to Chin. And Bocko believes cost reductions are coming that will make polysilicon OLEDs financially viable in the near future. He’s not alone.

While 100M 2-inch OLED displays is exciting for many suppliers, it is not that interesting for Corning since the glass needed for this is tiny in comparison to its other markets. The prize is OLEDs in TVs, which will consume large quantities of glass. If, how and when these will arrive remains unclear, but Corning is being prudent and developing the capability now so it is ready if and when OLED TVs become commercialized. That’s just good planning and sharp eyesight in the rear view mirror.