What Display Daily thinks: UDC is probably the least interesting company to follow because it does one thing, OLED materials, and promises one thing, PHOLED, all with predictable results. It’s a nice earner, to use Tony Soprano parlance, for anyone that likes quarterly financial calls, and nice dividends. The company has very good profit margins.
But, it almost always feels like you are covering an arbitrage business more than a tech company. In other words, the company would probably evolve much better if it were private.
The reality is that the OLED materials market is going to change dramatically in the next 18 months with new suppliers, and Chinese manufacturers are close enough to cracking the OLED cheat codes to play offense against Samsung and LG. UDC will still be relevant and I doubt that we will have anything but the same conversations about it next year and the year after that.
All the while, the display market is not standing still. Blue PHOLED is not a magic bullet anymore. It’s just ammo.
Uncertainty Looms Over UDC’s Blue Phosphorescent OLED Production Plans
The Elec, everyone’s favorite South Korean publication, has a good lead story in its display section. Apparently, the PHOLED from UDC remains uncertain as of the start of the second quarter of 2024. Despite UDC’s repeated assertions since early 2022 of commercializing blue phosphorescent OLED by the end of 2024, The Elec is saying that the mysterious “industry sources” indicate that the development is not up to par.
At a recent UBI Research event in Seoul, UDC Vice President Mike Hack reiterated the company’s goal to ready blue PHOLEDs for mass production by year-end. However, those pesky industry insiders report that the new blue OLEDs are producing a cyan color, deviating from the desired blue, and raising concerns about their performance stability and application potential.
An emerging alternative in the industry is the ‘deuterium blue’ technology, which involves replacing regular hydrogen with deuterium in blue fluorescent OLED devices to achieve a deeper blue hue. This technique, already applied by LG Display, has demonstrated enhanced physical stability and efficiency, particularly under high brightness conditions.
Manufactured by Japan’s Idemitsuko and America’s DuPont, deuterium blue materials have reportedly improved luminance by 30% in applications by LG Display. The robustness of deuterium blue suggests it might eclipse the development of blue phosphorescent OLEDs, especially if UDC fails to stabilize their product soon.
The phosphorescent method UDC is exploring aims to use both singlet exciton and triplet exciton for maximizing internal luminescence efficiency up to 100%. In contrast, the traditional fluorescent method, which only uses singlet excitons, achieves a 25% efficiency. Despite the potential for a 25% reduction in power consumption with the new technology, the timeline for mass production and application specifics remains unconfirmed, casting doubt on the commercial availability of UDC’s blue phosphorescent OLED devices within this year.
