SIDTEK presenting China OLEDoS industry status and challenges at K-Display 2025 (Source: SIDTEK)

At the business forum of K-Display 2025, held from August 6-9, China’s SIDTEK discloses OLEDoS mass production status and future expansion strategy. In addition to announcing the start of mass production at its Wuhu facility, SIDTEK also announced that it has completed the groundbreaking of an additional factory and is preparing for a third facility. Amidst active competition from local governments to build OLEDoS mass production plants, SIDTEK has made it clear that its business progress in China should be based on “breaking ground and bringing in equipment” rather than announcing “contracts,” and plans to rapidly expand its production base with multi-base operations.

The pace of expansion in the Chinese ecosystem is also accelerating. SIDTEK explains that it has formed a “three-company simultaneous mass production” structure with BOE and SEEYA. Goertek, a set company, is also reportedly looking into the possibility of investing in the deposition process to directly control the display, which is the key to VR costs. The combination of these moves could lead to a production capacity scenario of tens of thousands of sheets per month for 12-inch in the medium term. The strategy is to use the power of scale to lower costs and speed up development capacity.

The speaker posed the question, “If OLEDoS is such good technology, why aren’t there any buyers around?” He emphasized the realism that large-scale facility investment should be judged by production volume, which is “can it be sold like a cell phone,” and that from a manufacturing perspective, demand validation and profitability should come first.

In-house design of backplane semiconductors was presented as a key solution to low yields that affect production prices. The diagnosis is that the low yield of Micro-OLEDs is not only due to technical difficulties, but also to unclear responsibility for defects that occur in the structure where the backplane (semiconductor) and panel are separated, and delays in improvement. “We need to bring the semiconductor inside and close the defect analysis and improvement loop,” SIDTEK emphasized. In China, vertical integration is spreading across the industry, with SEEYA investing in the wafer stage to optimize integration, and BOE preparing to enter the market with existing line capacity.

The product and market strategy is focused on “lightweight AR” in the near term. The speaker is skeptical of the “full screen all the time with glasses” scenario and predicts that AR will first be popularized for simple information such as navigation and notifications. As a result, optimizing backplane chips (BPICs) and optics, focusing on power consumption, visibility, and uniformity, rather than racing to ultra-high resolutions, is a challenge. Balancing realistic price points and ease of use will be key to early adoption, he said.

Judgments were also shared on the display technology axis. In VR, fast LCD, glass-based OLED, and OLEDoS are competing, with glass-based OLED, with its size scalability and optical simplification advantages, likely to emerge in the low-end and entry-level segments, while OLEDoS will share the role at the high-end. In the AR, the view was that LCoS, OLEDoS, and LEDoS will coexist, but that the volatility of the OLEDoS position should be noted, leaving open the possibility of a shift to LEDoS if ultra-high resolution is not a requirement.

During the on-site discussion, it was suggested that “VR devices have the potential to become widespread if lightweight and convenient designs can be achieved,” and that AI-based image processing combined with interaction will serve as a catalyst for this development.

SIDTEK’s announcement reaffirms its realist strategy centered on “real mass production factories” and “securing profitability”. The company plans to build credibility with multi-location mass production, speed up learning to improve production yield and defects with in-house design of backplane semiconductors, and open up the market with design and process optimization tailored to the lightweight AR segment, where near-term demand is gathering. Despite demand uncertainty in China, SIDTEK is responding with a conservative, execution-focused expansion strategy, as government-led investments and vertical integration among companies continue to drive the “game of scale” in the country.

Changho Noh, Analyst at UBI Research  (chnoh@ubiresearch.com)

UBI Research’s Micro Display Reports