Steve Abramson
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your questions
Thanks, Darice, and welcome to everyone on today's call. Our second quarter 2018 revenues were $56.1 million, operating profit was $10.9 million, and net income was $10.8 million, or $0.23 per diluted share. Without the impact of ASC606, our second quarter results would have been $73.6 million in revenue, $28.4 million in operating profit, and $25.1 million in net income, or $0.54 per diluted share. As we outlined in May, the first quarter was the bottom for material shipments for the year. In the second quarter, material sales began to improve as expected. With anticipated new OLED product launches from leading OEMs around the world, including Apple, Google, Huawei, Oppo, Samsung, and Vivo, we continue to believe that we will see an additional pick up in orders and revenues in the second-half of the year. And in 2019, we continue to anticipate it to be a meaningful year of growth. 2019 is poised to be a pivotal year for the OLED industry. As Samsung continues to lead the OLED mobile market, a number of other panel makers, including LG Display, BOE, Tianma, Visionox, and EDO are slated to commence production in their new OLED launch. As a result, the landscape of capacity will significantly widen fueling broader adoption of OLEDs across the consumer electronics market. This new wave of capacity build is expected to drive significant growth in the OLED industry. Additionally, the long-awaited introduction of the world's first foldable OLED product next year will pave the cutting-edge and innovative foreign factor path for portable [ph] to foldable to rollable, exciting and enlarging the consumer electronics industry with new applications and new markets, the imagination is yet to devise. One of the key players leading the path to foldable is Samsung. Samsung recently announced that unbreakable smartphone panel has been verified by Underwriters Laboratories, an official testing company for OSHA. Samsung noted that, "The fortified plastic window is especially suitable for portable electronic devices not only because of its unbreakable characteristics, but also because of its lightweight, transmissivity and hardness, which are all very similar to glass." Foldables were also a topic to Samsung's earnings call last week. The company highlighted that it believes the introduction of the foldable foreign factor will bring new energy to the mobile market. Also discussed on its conference call were fab loading rates. Samsung's rigid OLED utilization rates increased in the June quarter and in the second-half half of the year the company expects its flexible OLED panel shipments to rebound. And to top it all off, Samsung unpacked the beautiful Note 9 earlier today, and last week, the company unveiled its 2018 flagship tablet, the Galaxy tab S4 with a stunning 10.5 inch super AMOLED display. During LG Display's earnings conference call, the company reaffirmed its commitment to OLEDs, reiterating its OLED TV and mobile capacity plans, including its Gen 8.5 OLED TV plant in Guangzhou, China, its Gen 6 Mobile OLED Live and Gen 10.5 OLED TV facility in Paju, Korea. And the company shared that it's reviewing additional OLED TV capacity players, including the option of converting some LCD TV capacity to OLED, driving these additional OLED TV players' demand. LG Display is targeting approximately 2.8 million OLED TV shipments this year, 4 million units in 2019, 7 million in 2020, and 10 million in 2021. An interesting size fact, while 10 million units is less than 5% of the total TV market of approximately 250 million units, those 10 million OLED TVs in square meters is equivalent to over 60% of the total smartphone market of approximately 1.6 billion units. That is a lot of glass to cope with our materials. In Japan, Sharp started a pilot OLED production in June and plans to launch a company branded OLED smartphone in the fourth quarter of this year. And in China, OLED activity continues to grow. BOE Technology's Gen 6 flexible OLED plant in Chengdu, which opened last year, is ramping production and it's efforts are paying off. It has been reported that BOE has successfully secured its first large OLED design win with Huawei's flagship smartphone, the Mate 20 Pro, which will be launched later this year. Construction of BOE's second Gen6 OLED plant, in Mianyang, is reportedly progressing ahead of schedule for production next year. And BOE's third OLED fab in Chongqing [ph] is expected in the second-half of 2020. Tianma held an opening ceremony for the first phase of its Gen6 OLED line, in June. And just the other week the company approved the construction on the second phase, which is scheduled to commence production in the second-half of 2020. The combined capacity of these two lines will total 37,500 plates per month. Visionox, with whom we signed long-term license and material agreements in the quarter recently opened its Gen6 flexible OLED plant, with an investment of approximately $4 billion, mass production of this 30,000 plates per month line is expected to commence by the end of next year. Last month, EDO announced that it completed the construction of its Gen6 flexible OLED fab in Shanghai, and is targeting trial production in 2019, and mass production in 2021. Royole made quite the splash when the company unveiled its flexible OLED shirt and flexible OLED top hat at the recent World Cup finals in Moscow, and plans to start commercial shipments of their flexible wearables attire in November. And in automotive OLEDs, during its Singapore investor's forum, Samsung Electronics highlighted automotive OLED displays as a segment of high growth. Samsung noted that while it expect the automotive display market to grow at a 9% CAGR from 2018 to 2022, it forecasts automotive OLEDs will grow at a much faster rate, at 834% CAGR, from 100,000 in 2018 to three million units in 2022. At SID Display Week Samsung demonstrated many automotive OLED displays, including curved, rollable unbreakable transparent and light-feel OLED displays, and unveiled what it calls an unbreakable 6.22 inch display with an all-plastic design that has additional durability for the automotive environment. Also with respect to the automotive market, on the OLED lighting front, LG Display is reportedly in discussions with 10 car manufacturers to utilize OLED lighting. And as adoptees, already include BMW, Mercedes Benz, and Audi. Speaking of Audi, last month Audi released the specs of its 2019 TT and 2019 flagship A8, and both have OLED taillights as an available feature. OLED lighting is still a small market, but it has a big and bright future. UBI market research forecasts that the OLED lighting market will grow to approximately $1.6 billion by 2020. On the internal R&D front, we are working closely with our customers, and continue to invent and commercialize higher-performing cost-effective next generation emissive material systems and technologies, including new reds, greens, yellows, and hosts. With respect to blue, we believe that we are making excellent in our ongoing development work for a commercial phosphorescent blue emissive system. Additionally, and important component to our growth strategy is developing groundbreaking technologies that can help advance the OLED market. And one of our major R&D initiatives is OVJP, Organic Vapor Jet Printing for large-area TVs. We are making advancements with this novel mask-less solvent-less dry direct printing technology. To help further our progress we will be installing our pilot prototype system next month. On that note, let me turn the call over to Sid.