The next generation of
big-screen TV setsis coming fast. There are
investor profits to be madein this revolution.
In a fresh market report, IT researcher iSupplisees
OLED TV screensrising from a paltry $10 million of
worldwide revenue this year to an eye-popping $1.8 billion in
2015. It's an exponential growth curve that started when
Sony (NYSE: SNE) sold its first 11-inch OLED
television. In six years, those big and expensive TV screens
will edge out small-screen phone displays as the largest OLED
market when you count by revenue.
Even so, OLED screens will make up a vanishingly small
portion of the total TV market in six years. The
manufacturing facilities for OLED displays we have today are
not designed to crank out enormous screens suitable for your
living room. OLED is a fairly new technology with a few
technical limitations of its own, and it will take years to
build out a reliable large-scale manufacturing
infrastructure. And the incumbent LCD display technology
won't stand still while OLED matures, so the competition will
be stronger. All told, iSuppli expects that only a couple
percent of all TVs sold in 2015 will be built around OLED
technology.
But the investing opportunity remains enormous. OLED
technologist
Universal Display (Nasdaq: PANL) is on pace
to collect around $5 million in commercial sales in 2009 from
licensing its patents to device makers like
Samsung and
AU Optronics (NYSE: AUO). When you consider
iSuppli's $10 million estimate for TV screen sales, it's easy
to see that Universal Display takes home a large portion of
those sales. Keep in mind that most OLED sales come from
small-screen gadgets like
Nokia (NYSE: NOK)
cell phonesand
SanDisk (Nasdaq: SNDK) MP3 players, and that
we don't know how much revenue Universal Display collects
from each bleeding-edge TV sold.
Still, the company obviously has a big finger in this pie
and is set to ride the TV revolution to astounding riches.
And the main competition comes from multinational giants like
Eastman Kodak (NYSE: EK) and
Sumitomo Chemical . Universal Display is
small and obscure, and can easily
multiply your investment many times overwhen catalysts
like the TV revolution kick in.
This article was originally published as
I, for One, Welcome Our New OLED Overlordson
Fool.com
Copyright © 2009 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights
reserved.
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