Industry Focus

News on January 30, in recent years, with the rapid rise of BOE, TCL Huaxing and many other domestic display panel manufacturers, domestic LCD shipments have won more than 67% of the global LCD panel market share, but in the OLED panel market, domestic panel factories are still catching up, especially in the equipment and raw materials required to manufacture OLEDs are still subject to foreign manufacturers. Recently, the domestic manufacturer Huancaixing Technology broke the monopoly of Japan for the first time and successfully mass-produced FMM (Fine Metal Mask), a key material required for OLED panel manufacturing.

OLED penetration accelerated, and domestic OLED production capacity grew rapidly

With the continuous maturity of OLED technology, the commercialization trend of OLED panels is gradually reflected, and the market scale is growing. According to DSCC data, the penetration rate of OLED is gradually increasing, and it is expected that the penetration rate of OLED in the display field will be equal to that of LCD in 2022, and the penetration rate will surpass LCD in 2023. According to Omdia, from 2021 to 2028, the shipment area demand for OLED display panels will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11.6% to 30.7 million square meters.

With the continuous growth of the OLED panel market, it has also driven the rapid development of the upstream OLED material market. According to Omdia, the global OLED materials market size is expected to grow by 40% to $1.754 billion in 2021; Small size RGB OLED materials will account for 70% of the total OLED material market; Large-size OLED materials will grow 69% to $541 million, making the market huge. It is expected that the global sales of OLED materials will reach 2.195 billion US dollars in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 30%, and by 2025, the sales volume of OLED materials market is expected to reach 2.9 billion US dollars.

From the perspective of the development of the domestic OLED industry, with the continuous maturity of OLED technology, its application is becoming more and more extensive, especially mobile phone manufacturers accelerate the introduction of domestic OLED screens, domestic OLED panel manufacturers are also continuing to expand the layout of OLED production lines. At present, Chinese mainland manufacturers have built or are under construction more than 20 OLED production lines, and after all these production lines are completed and put into operation, the estimated production capacity is about 886,500 pieces per month.

Data show that in 2021, the scale of China's OLED market has reached 263.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 31.3%; It is estimated that in 2022, the scale of China's OLED market will reach 322.5 billion yuan. According to Omdia's forecast, looking at the announced OLED production line, by 2026, China's OLED panel production capacity is expected to account for 49.04% of the global production capacity, which is equal to the Korean OLED panel production capacity. With the rise of domestic OLED, it will also directly drive the development of domestic OLED raw material industry.

OLED core materials are still subject to people

OLED, also known as "organic light-emitting diode", one of the flat panel display technologies, has the characteristics of self-luminescence, so it has an exclusive raw material, that is, organic light-emitting materials. Organic light-emitting materials are the key core materials of OLED panels, which directly determine the luminescence characteristics of the panel, accounting for 23% of the cost, and are also one of the areas with the highest technical barriers.

The basic device structure of OLED includes a cathode, an electron injection layer, an electron transport layer, an organic light-emitting layer, a hole transport layer, a hole injection layer, an anode, and a substrate. Organic luminescent materials can be divided into luminescent functional materials, hole functional materials and electronic functional materials according to their use, among which luminescent functional materials can be further divided into red light subject/doping material, green light subject/doping material and blue light body/doping material.

Luminescent functional materials can be divided into fluorescent materials, phosphorescent materials and TADF materials according to generational division. Fluorescence luminescence is the first generation of luminescence technology, with poor luminous efficiency of only 25%. Phosphorescence is the second generation of luminescence technology, and the luminous efficiency and luminescence effect are better than those of fluorescent materials. At present, red and green materials are already in the technology stage of phosphorescent materials, among which phosphorescent materials have been applied on a large scale; The blue light phosphorescent material is still in the research and development stage. The third-generation luminescence technology is thermally activated delayed fluorescent materials (TADFs), which are still in the research and development stage and have not yet achieved commercial application.

The production process of OLED organic light-emitting materials can be divided into three stages: intermediates, front-end materials and terminal materials. The first is to synthesize the chemical raw materials of organic luminescent materials into intermediates; The intermediate is then synthesized into the front-end material through one or more steps; Finally, the terminal material is obtained after multiple sublimation and purification of the front-end material. The end material is the sublimated material that can be evaporated directly onto the substrate for the production of OLED panels.

The purity of the front-end material is relatively low, and its technical barriers are relatively low. The terminal material is directly used in the manufacture of OLED panels, for high purity requirements, the general purity requirements are 6-8N (99.99999%-99.999999%) or more, if the purity of the terminal material is not up to standard, non-luminous impurities will make the OLED display appear black spots, and will accelerate the overall oxidation process of organic light-emitting materials, resulting in a large area of flower screen, black screen phenomenon, reduce the service life of the panel. Therefore, the end material has a high technical barrier and patent barrier.

At present, in terms of the localization of intermediates and front-end materials, domestic manufacturers are also accelerating their progress. Wanrun Co., Ltd., Ruilian New Materials, Agraya and other enterprises have achieved mass production of intermediates and front-end materials, and successfully entered the supplier of terminal materials. Wanrun Co., Ltd.'s customers are mainly German Merck; Related new materials are mainly based on hole transport layer materials and fluorescent blue light-emitting layer materials; Agria has developed more than 40 kinds of OLED materials with mass production capabilities.

Terminal materials have high requirements for sublimation and purification, high technical barriers, core technologies and patents have long been in the hands of a few overseas manufacturers, and the market is mainly monopolized by overseas enterprises such as the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Germany. The main manufacturers include Japan's Idemitsu Kosan, Germany's Merck, the United States' UDC, Dow Chemical, Sumitomo Chemical, etc., the top three manufacturers have a market share of more than 65%, and the market concentration is high.