Steve Abramson
Analyst · Deutsche Bank
Thanks, Darice and welcome to everyone on today's call. Start, I would like to remind everyone that we adopted the new accounting standard for revenue recognition ASC606 effective January 1, 2018. Our first quarter 2018 revenue were $43.6 million; operating profit was $4.5 million and net income was $6 million or $0.13 per share. These first quarter financial results were below our expectations and we believe this is primarily due to three factors. First, the smartphone market, the short-term slowdown in the premium smartphone market, which we expect to last through the second quarter is impairing our customers, production plans, which in turn, we believe is impacting our materials business. During the quarter material sales demand for OLED panels declined faster and to a greater magnitude than we expected. The second factor was new accounting standard ASC606. Without the impact of the ASC606 our first quarter results would have been $68.2 million in revenue $29.2 million in operating profit and $25.9 million in net income, or $0.55 per share. And thirdly as we mentioned previously last quarter, the inventory pre-purchasing of materials we believe that occurred in the fourth quarter of 2017. We spent orders of revenues the pickup in the second half of the year. However, due to weakness in the first-half we are revising our 2018 revenue guidance range to between $280 million and $310 million. Sid will go into further detail shortly. So where do we expect things to go from here when and what will fuel the pickup and what is our view beyond this year. From materials sales standpoint, we believe Q1 represents the bottom for the year. The OLED panel market conditions are expected to remain weak in the second quarter due to the soft smartphone environment which is consistent with Samsung and LG's comments last week on their respective earnings call. And we expect the pickup in OLED panel demand in the second half of the year, looking out to next year, we expect significant growth to resume. Long-term OLED market fundamentals remain robust. We are encouraged by the ongoing OLED investment plans like current and new OLED manufacturers, OLED mobile panel makers are improving yields and costs which are expected to further increase OLED's competitiveness, OLED TVs are continuing to garner interest from a number of OEMs are gaining market share in the premium market and R&D activity, in foldable OLED products is accelerating. In the small and medium display market we expect top smartphone leaders to launch new flagship OLED mobile products in the second half of the year. Apple is expected to launch two new OLED smartphones in the third quarter, Samsung is also expected to launch its flagship Note 9 in the third quarter, on a broader scale OLED panel manufacturers are focused on driving the proliferation of OLED by working with OEMs on new designs to expand the adoption of OLEDs and to expend their own customer wins, increasing the competitiveness of OLED our reducing costs and improving yields and broadening product landscape applications like IT and automotive, and investing in differentiating attributes but new form factors. OLEDs are inherently conformable, foldable and rollable. With Samsung reiterating plans to launch a foldable OLED display product and panel makers recently showcasing advances in foldable OLED panels, foldable R&D activity is heating up. Mostly recently in China major players including BOE, Vision Ops, Tianma and EverDisplay all displayed [ph] foldable display prototypes at last month's China Information Technology Expo. Also last month it was reported that Huawei is planning to launch a foldable OLED handset later this year with additional plans to launch a foldable phone with 5G support in the second half of 2019. In the large area display market OLED TV has continued to gain global momentum. LG Display continues to add OEMs to their OLED TV customer list with the most recent being [Indiscernible] in China. OLED TVs are also gaining share in the premium market with an expanding OEM base and growing market share demand is outpacing supply. LG Display recently reported the current OLED TV demand exceeds supply by 30%. This is when LGD to start reviewing additional new OLED TV capacity plans. Also, during last week's earning call LG reaffirmed its plans to increase OLED TV shipments by approximately 50% year-over-year to 2.5 to 2.8 million units. Adding to all this OLED TV momentum is Samsung. Samsung has reportedly resumed its OLED TV research activity. With respect to the multiyear OLED CapEx growth cycle we are in while we are seeing some capacity digestion this year, we're also seeing a significant amount of capacity building, a number of panel manufacturers are building the framework for the next expansion wave of high volume OLED productions, which is expected to ramp next year. New capacity takes approximately 12 to 24 months to build. These new capacity builds primarily in China for mobile and OLED TVs are expected to begin to materialize into additional revenue opportunities for us next year. Looking out for 2019, we anticipate the significant growth in the OLED industry to resume, as we expect the installed capacity base as measured in square meters to increase by approximately 50% by the end of 2019, as compared to the end of 2017. Samsung noted on its recent conference call that it's actively responding to demands for flexible OLED products, increasing market share by expanding its consumer base and proven cost competitiveness by cutting edge technologies and products, reinforcing competencies in new applications and offering differentiated technologies outside of LCDs. LG Display reiterated its OLED CapEx plans to build new mobile and OLED TV capacity. LG's second OLED TV fab located in Guangzhou is on track to ramp production in the second half of 2019. And due to the strong and growing demand environment LGD is considering plans to build additional new OLED TV capacity possibly by converting some of its LCD TV capacity to OLED TV capacity. In Japan, Sharp announced earlier this year that it was sampling OLED panels from its Gen4 [Indiscernible] pilot line and will begin production for Sharp's own branded smartphones in the summer of 2018. It has been reported that this line is expected to ramp to 15,000 plates per month by year-end. And in China a region that is an increasing revenue contributor for us. BOE technology is currently ramping its first Gen6 flexible OLED plant in Chengdu. Construction of its second Gen6 OLED plant in Mianyang is reportedly progressing ahead of schedule with production slated to commence next year and on March 9th, BOE announced plans to construct its third OLED fab in [indiscernible] BOEs new fab will cost approximately $7.3 billion and is expected to commence production in the second half of 2020. China’s aggressive OLED stance is also evident with pilot and initial commercial production capacity plants from EverDisplay's Gen6 fab or [OLED] Gen5.5 line and Go Vision Ops Gen6 plant. In the automotive market in addition to the growing use of OLED is taillights: OLED display design activity is increasing. Samsung has previously highlighted some of OLED display's benefit for autos including high contrast, which means less eye fatigue, white color gamut which means natural saturated consistent colors, low temperature response time, which means the staggering extreme coldness that you experience with LCDs and flexible display design that means you cannot only create conformable displays, but also unbreakable displays that are made on plastic. Most recently it was reported that Mercedes-Benz has designed LG Display's OLED panels in some of its models starting in 2020, this is in addition to the reported reporting OLED design wins with Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors. According to UBI Research, the automotive OLED display market is expected to grow from $4 million today to $5 billion in 2022. On the lighting front OLEDWorks recently introduced its next-generation OLED lighting panel the [Brace] which has higher efficacy and lifetime. In addition, OLEDWorks launched the Bendolet, its first flexible and conformable OLED lighting platform. According to OLEDWorks, Bendolet marries featherweight elegance with bold lighting functionality powering exceptional designs from architectural lighting to transportation. Only microns in thickness and grams in weight Bendolet delivers a superb light quality and excellent color rendering that is uniquely achievable with OLED. What is also paving our path for long-term growth is our continued innovative R&D work, our team of scientists and engineers are continually discovering and developing new emissive material systems and technologies, including next-generation red, green, yellow [indiscernible] to meet our customer's ever demanding and ever evolving performance needs for displays and lighting. With respect to blue, we believe we are making excellent headway in our ongoing development work for our commercial phosphorescent blue emissive [ph]. Additionally, we continue to make advancements with our novel organic vapor jet printing technology for maskless. Solventless dry direct printing of large area OLED panels. On that note let me turn the call over to Sid.