Steven Abramson
Analyst · Brian Lee with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Darice, and welcome to everyone on today’s call. We are pleased to report second quarter 2019 revenues under ASC 606 of $118.2 million, operating profit of $48.7 million and net income of $43.4 million, or $0.92 per share. Under ASC 605, the prior accounting standard, our second quarter 2019 revenues would have been about the same at $119.8 million, operating income of $50.3 million and net income of $44.8 million, or $0.95 per diluted share.Including these results is approximately $15 million to $20 million of orders we estimate or pulled-in from the second-half of the year from our Chinese customers due to what we believe or trade-related reasons. With all of them as I’m continuing to grow, we’re raising our 2019 revenue guidance. Our new 2019 revenue forecast under ASC 606 is in the range of $370 million to $390 million. Under ASC 605, 2019 revenues are expected to be in the range of $425 million to $435 million. Sid will provide further details shortly.In the past three months, OLED activity has continued to increase across the consumer landscape. As a display of choice for premium smartphones, premium TVs and smart watches, OLEDs have been gaining strong traction in the consumer electronics market and emerging new segment is the IT market.From Samsung Display’s announcement in May that it was expanding its AMOLED commercial focus to the IT market to laptop makers, showcasing OLED products at Taiwan’s Computex Trade Show in June, including the Gigabyte AERO 15, Alienware m15, ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo, Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition and the Dell XPS 15, what’s driving this interest in OLED and IT.As Samsung noted in their announcement, AMOLED displays are known, not only for their outstanding color reproduction, but also for properties that enable low-power consumption, ultra slim bezels and thin light designs. They also noted that AMOLED panels deliver the best display specifications for notebooks by enhancing the mobility and seamless streaming capabilities for high-resolution gaming and graphics content.Samsung further highlighted that AMOLED display solutions have been optimized for cloud and streaming services that speed up the commercialization of 5G technology. They believe that their latest AMOLED displays will allow users to have the most visually stunning experience in the 5G era with its rapid response rate and exceptionally high frame rate, while delivering unbelievably rich DisplayHDR True Black colorization.Additionally, Samsung announced last week that it expects to begin shipping the Galaxy Fold in September. And on Tuesday, Samsung reported that Q2 OLED panel sales grew quarter-over-quarter and made up a significant percentage of its display revenues in the high-70% range.Looking forward, Samsung forecasted OLED growth, with shipments in utilization rates to increase in the second-half of the year over the first-half of the year. During its recent earnings call, LG Display laid out its total OLED solution strategy, spanning from small size to ultra large size. On the mobile side, LGD noted that its plastic OLED plant in Paju will commence operations in the second-half of this year.Additionally, augmenting its small and medium portfolio, LGD will also launch its first plastic OLED display for the automotive market in the coming months. On the large size front, LGD second OLED TV fab in Guangzhou, China will reportedly be completed at the end of this month. This new Gen 8.5 factory is expected to have an initial installed capacity of 60,000 substrates per month, nearly doubling LG’s total output to 130,000 substrates per month.Last week, LG Display announced a new $2.6 billion investment for its Gen 10.5 OLED TV plant in Paju, which will commence production in the first-half of 2022, with 30,000 substrates starts per month and an additional 15,000 substrates starts per month in the first-half of 2023.According to reports, there are currently 10 OLED facilities expected to be built in China over the next three years, leaning China’s OLED investment is BOE. Last month, BOE announced the opening of its second OLED fab in Mianyang, similar to its first fab in Chengdu, as well as their announced third and fourth OLED fab in Chongqing and Fuzhou, respectively. Mianyang is a Gen six flexible OLED fab slated to have 48,000 substrates starts per month.According to reports, Visionox is accelerating its expansion in OLED smartphones, wearable devices, vehicle-mounted systems and intelligent homes. The company is expected to commence commercial production at its Hebei Gu’an fab at the end of this year. This 30,000 plates per month fab being on pilot production last year and Visionox is building its second OLED production line in Hefei, which will also produce 30,000 plates per month.In lighting, OLEDWorks announced its collaboration with Audi to advance OLED lighting technology in automotive applications. Additionally, OLEDWorks announced an exclusive arrangement with Acuity Brands, North America’s largest lighting company, to work on an expanded OLED product portfolio.Acuity Brands, using OLEDWorks technology, intends to develop a series of affordable and innovative OLED Luminaries for architectural lighting applications. The OLED revolution is just getting started in this multi-year OLED CapEx growth cycle. We continue to estimate the year-end 2019 installed base of OLEDs square meter capacity will have increased by approximately 50% over year-end 2017.On the R&D front, we’re developing new OLED technologies and next-generation materials to stay ahead of the curve and continue to leverage our first-mover leadership position. Let me walk you through some of our initiatives.OVJP, organic vapor jet printing, is our novel manufacturing process for mask-less, solvent-less, dry direct printing of large area OLED panels. At SID’s Display Week in May, we showcased for the very first time printed panels from our OVJP pilot system. At the Display Trade Show, you were able to view up-closely essentially perfect lines we’ve printed in our pilot line tool and we have already been able to achieve lifetimes of over 50,000 hours at LT95 at 1,000 nits for green PHOLED. This is very encouraging for very early data.And just last month, we received the third and last chamber of our pilot system, which will enable us to make full color RGB test panels. We are excited about the continued progress we are making and for the commercialization path of OVJP.With multiple customers who have numerous product roadmaps for a myriad of end users, the discovery, development and delivery of new phosphorescent emissive materials, including new reds, greens, yellows and blues continues to be our highest priority. Specifically on the blue front, we continue to make excellent progress in our ongoing development work for commercial phosphorescent blue emissive system.As a number of end user specs continues to rapidly evolve with the adoption of OLEDs across a broad array of consumer products, including AR/VR, smart watches, smartphones, tablets, laptops, automotive and TVs, corresponding new OLED recipes need to be designed to meet those ever-changing and ever-demanding specs.To help enable our customers and accelerate the design pace, we have been establishing a network of OLED material partnerships. These partnerships will censor on our proprietary phosphorescent emitters, which are at the heart of essentially every commercial OLED stack to ensure high-performing, highly efficient and cost-effective OLED solutions. We expect to be able to announce some of these partnerships in the coming months.We have been working on developing new host materials side-by-side with our PHOLED emitters. We’ve also been working on a new host commercialization roadmap. One of the partnership frameworks that we have been establishing over the past few years is with local material companies to commercialize hosts that are complementary to our proprietary phosphorescent emitters. These local partners will be volume manufacturers of these complementary hosts for direct sales to specific customers, creating a win-win situation for us, our partners and our customers.And lastly, we announced in May, the establishment of UDC Ventures, our corporate venture arm. UDC Ventures seeks to partner with entrepreneurs, disruptive startups and innovative emerging companies and fields related to our strategic focus area. We seek to be impactful strategic investors, with companies that could be at any stage, ranging from pre-commercial stage, research and development to early prototypes through late-stage established companies.We believe that these and our other strategic initiatives will strengthen and support our primary focus of enabling our customer success and therefore our success.On that note, let me turn the call over to Sid.