Shenzhen Enrich Electronics Co.,Ltd

With the decision by LeGold Display (LGD) to build the world's largest display factory, the P10, into the 10.5 OLED panel production line, causing concern about LGD's funding sources and the supply of vapor deposition equipment, these two issues may be related to the LGD production plan. The key to success or failure.

According to the bellows of the Korean media, LGD decided to set the investment direction of the P10 factory to 10.5 generation OLED production line, and the production capacity will be increased from the current 30,000 pieces per month to 45,000 pieces per month, expanding by 50%. However, the poor market conditions of the LCD market have led to a decrease in LGD profits and increased financial variables, which may affect other investment plans in 2018. Large-scale OLED panel evaporation machine only YAS exclusive production, the successful development of the machine platform will become the key.

In July 2017, LGD decided to invest 20 trillion won (about 18.5 billion US dollars) to develop OLED business, of which 5 trillion won was used for the P10 plant. Simply considering increasing the P10 capacity by 50% will inevitably increase the investment amount by about 2.5 trillion won.

In addition, the number of processes for coating OLEDs on substrates is larger than that of LCDs, and more machine equipment is required, and LGD must also pay the original liquidated damages against LCDs for equipment purchases. In previous LGD-purchased LCD production equipment, only the backplane equipment could be shared with the OLED process.

However, LGD’s profitability of LCD business has shrunk. In the first quarter of 2018, it hit a loss for the first time in six years. The operating deficit is close to 100 billion won. The operating profit of 2018 is also lowered from 5.5 trillion to 6 trillion won. At 4.5 trillion won, the sources of funds for investment have been hidden.

The South Korean financial industry predicts that LGD will reduce the scale of other investment projects and give priority to the smooth implementation of the 10.5 line investment plan. LGD's planned investment plans include the 8th generation OLED production line in Guangzhou, China, and the 6th generation OLED production line (E6) in Paju, South Korea. Recently, the 8th-generation LCD plant in South Korea has also been considered as an OLED production line.

If you exclude funds, production equipment is also a checkpoint. Evaporation machines are the key equipment for the performance of left and right OLED panels. Large-size OLED machines are exclusively available from South Korea's YAS. Three YAS vapor deposition machines are used on LGD South Korea's 8th generation OLED production line (P9). This line has achieved a stable high process yield, with a monthly production capacity of approximately 34,000 pieces.

Although YAS is equipped with 8-wire line-specific machine technology, the 10.5-generation line equipment is the first challenge, and the increase in substrate size will result in sagging in the middle, and the industry must solve it. Because the OLED panel must heat the RGB organic material under vacuum in a high temperature state and perform vapor deposition from the bottom up, if the central portion of the substrate sags, the RGB material will not be uniformly vaporized.

Informed sources said that YAS has overcome the technical problems of various 10.5 generation line machines and hopes to ship LGD as soon as possible. LGD tentatively plans to launch the 10.5 OLED production line in 2020, but it may postpone to 2021 if commercial time delays are introduced.