Steve Abramson
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead
Thanks Darice, and welcome to everyone on today’s call. 2018 set the stage for the OLED industry’s next growth phase with new OLE capacity announcements and expanding lists of panel manufacturers entering commercial OLE production and the broadening landscape of consumer end products. All of this fortifies the foundation for a strong growth in the coming years for the industry and for us. Our 2018 revenues under ASC 606 were $247 million, operating income was $57 million and net income was $59 million or $1.24 per diluted share. Under ASC 605, the prior accounting standard, our 2018 revenues would have been $326 million, operating income of $136 million and net income of $130 million or $2.77 per diluted share. These financial results show the magnitude of the impact that ASC 606 can have on the recognition of materials, royalty and licensing revenues. For 2019, we expect meaningful growth to resume as new capacity comes online, new OLED products are launched and progress continues with our customers’ commercialization plans. Our 2019 revenue forecast under ASC 606 is in the range of $325 million to $350 million. Under ASC 605, 2019 revenues are expected to be in the range of $395 million to $420 million. As we look back on 2018, we made significant progress with our internal growth roadmap, despite the soft premium smartphone market environment and excess inventory in the channel impacting our sales. This includes new customer agreements, advancement in our R&D programs, new infrastructure plans, and expanding our critical mass, all of which further solidifies our leadership position in the OLED ecosystem and buttresses our long-term plans to enable this growing industry in conjunction with increasing our top and bottom line. On the customer front, we announced an expanded evaluation agreement with Sharp and new long-term agreements with Samsung Display and Visionox in 2018. And last month, we announced a new agreement with Chinese micro-oven manufacturer, CR Technology. From a research and development standpoint, we are expanding our innovation pathways for our proprietary OLED materials and technologies, while also expanding our global IT matrix. We are innovating, inventing and introducing new OLED emissive materials and technologies, including new reds, greens, yellows and hosts. With respect to our blue emissive system, we continue to make excellent progress in our ongoing development work for our commercial phosphorescent blue emissive system. With our deep and broad experience and know-how of more than two decades of pioneering research, we are continually discovering, designing, and delivering the best OLED emissive layer materials to meet the ever growing and ever evolving specs for our expanding customer base. We work closely with each customer to custom design proprietary phosphorescent materials and device architectures that can meet their different specifications for color, efficiency, and lifetime. With numerous customers who have numerous product roadmaps for numerous end users, our material design and commercialization pipeline is busier than ever. With OVJP our novel solving-less mask-less deposition technology which allows power manufacturers to combine the benefits of using small molecule materials, the industry's trusted standard and the foundation for all of today's OLED products with a printing process that enables cost effective high performance large area side-by-side RGP patterning we have installed the first two chambers of our prototype system and are expecting delivery of the last chamber in the coming months. As we ramp our prototype system to advance OVJP’s commercialization path, we are also evaluating potential revenue and partnership opportunities. OVJP as part of our long term growth strategy and we believe that its commercial launch is about three years to five years away. We are in the midst of expanding our global presence in Asia as our customer base continues to increase we are broadening our onsite technical resources to further accelerate our customers time to market. In the U.S. our subsidiary Adesis opened its new state of the art chemistry laboratories in the fourth quarter of 2018. And here in Ewing, New Jersey we will be expanding our corporate and R&D facilities, this is all to meet the future needs of the OLED industry, our customers, our R&D programs and our employees. I remember back just a few decades ago there was just a handful of us and the UDC office was above a liquor store across the street from Princeton University. And now we're a global company enabling a $25 billion plus industry that is in the early stages of growth. As we saw at CES in Las Vegas last month and what we expect to see at Mobile World Congress next week in Barcelona, OLED technology is paving extraordinary paths for cutting-edge consumer display products. In the smartphone market foldable to becoming a major theme as consumer electronic OEM's reconcile the increasing customer appetite for larger displays and portability. OEMs including LG, Huawei, Vivo, Royale, Xiaomi and others have made public statements on their foldable future. And following up to its sneak peek and it’s the member developers forum Samsung showcased its foldable smartphone product yesterday at its unpacking event. On the IT front activity has increased significantly. At CES, Alienware, Dell, Lenovo, Razor and Samsung were all showcasing all their IT products and just a few weeks ago Samsung announced it would begin production of the world's first 4K 15.6-inch OLED displays for the notebook market. The Samsung notebook display panels will have a brightness level ranging from 0.00005 to 600 knits and a dynamic contrast ratio of 120,000 to 1. When compared to LCDs the blacks will appear 200 times darker and whites twice as bright. In the OLED TV market, LG Display increased its 2018 OLED TV shipments by 70% year-over-year to 2.9 million units, up from approximately 1.7 million in 2017. For 2019, LGD expects shipments to grow to approximately 3.8 million OLED TVs. Additionally LG announced at CES that it’s all inspired Global OLED TV will go into production sometime this year. Furthermore as the majority of OLED capacity being built is flexible, we expect the ramp of plastic OLED production to usher in new design possibilities for the display and lighting industries. From conformable to foldable to rollable, OLEDs are the only display technology that can commercially enable these exciting groundbreaking form factors. In the coming years, new ideas, new concepts and new products are expected to showcase the endless wonders and possibilities that OLEDs can engender. As we have noted in the past, we believe that we are in a multi-year OLED CapEx growth cycle. We continue to expect year end 2019 installed base of OLED square meter capacity to increase by approximately 50% over year end 2017. This growth cycle is fueled by the proliferation of OLEDs across the consumer electronic landscapes including AR/VR, smartwatches, smartphones, IT, automotive and TVs. With Samsung Display, OLEDs are becoming an increasingly significant contributor to its revenues. During its recent earnings call, Samsung announced that over 70% of its display sales stemmed from OLED. In addition to IT and automotive OLED design activity, Samsung launched the Galaxy S10 yesterday in San Francisco, marking the 10-year anniversary of the Galaxy S smartphone series. In 2010, when Samsung entered the nation's smartphone market and launched the Galaxy S, they made the bold move to differentiate their product with an OLED display, enabling great picture quality and a thin form factor. Fast forward to today and Samsung is a top leading smartphone manufacturer, and OLEDs are considered as the best-in-class for premium smartphones. During its earnings call, LG display reaffirmed its OLED TV production plants at 60,000 sheets per month of capacity and its new Guangzhou OLED Fab this year, bringing their total gen 8.5 OLED TV capacity to 130,000 sheets per month by the end of 2019. Additionally, LG display has allocated CapEx to add 30,000 sheets per month of Gen 6 flexible OLED mobile capacity next year. In Japan, Sharp launched the Aquos Zero smartphone in the fourth quarter of 2018, which features a 6.2-inch OLED screen. Sharpe’s first mobile OLED screen. And in China, there is new OLED capacity activity throughout the region. BOE technology broke on its third Gen 6 flexible mobile OLED fab in Chongqing in December. And the day after Christmas, BOE announced plans to build its fourth Gen 6 OLED Fab in Fuzhou with an investment of approximately $6.8 billion. During 2019, we expect BOE to continue to ramp its capacity in Chengdu and production is slated to commence at second facility in Mianyang later this year. TMR is currently rapid production and its Gen 6 flexible fab in Huawei. With approval secured for the construction of its second phase, TMR’s combined capacity of the two phases, is expected the total of 37,500 sheets per month by the end of 2020. Visionox with whom we signed long-term license and material supply agreements in June last year is in the midst of ramping its first Gen 6 flexible OLED plant. A second phase of this FAB was approved and is expected to begin mass production in late 2020, early 2021. While still at an early stage, the potential OLED lighting is tremendous due to its numerous benefits. These benefits include energy efficiency because of our proprietary phosphorescent materials, novel and innovative form factors which pave the way for balanced design opportunities, beautiful natural colors that create spectral distribution that is closest to natural sunlight, cool operating temperatures allowing users to handle them safely at low cost potential. With the development and commercialization of OLED accelerating in the consumer electronics market, and OLED lighting starting to enter niche commercial markets namely automotive, we are further strengthening our competitive. We are developing new OLED technologies and next-generation materials and continue to leverage and expand our first mover leadership position. And on that note, let me turn the call over to Sid.