Our OLED teams in Germany proudly look back on more than two decades of successful R&D. An important milestone was the inauguration of our OLED Application center in Darmstadt, opened in 2010. This allowed for an easy and direct access to the vast expertise and infrastructure offered by Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany headquarters – specifically in terms of analytics, synthesis scaleup and ultrapure chemicals production.

Another highlight was the opening of the 3,600 square meter dedicated OLED production plant with 1.200 m² cleanroom space in 2016, an investment of around € 30 million. This investment led to a fivefold increase in production capacity, and since then, production capacities have been continuously increased to meet the growing market requirements for outstanding materials for cutting-edge OLED displays.

We completed our OLED manufacturing capacity expansion project at its Poseung site in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea in 2022 and invested around 20 million Euros to install sublimation equipment and an OLED vacuum deposition unit.

We began to lay the foundation for R&D, production and the stable supply of OLED materials to Korean panel makers in 2005, as part of the strategy of achieving success through domestic research and production. We continuously interact with OLED researchers from Korean panel companies and we develop materials for OLED TV and flexible, rollable and foldable OLED displays together with our customers. The new equipment, installed at the Poseung site, improves the analysis and quality inspection capabilities of our OLED materials. 

In 2022, we inaugurated our first OLED production site in China, and it joins our China-based production of liquid crystals and photoresist materials. Our local OLED production gives our China-based and Asia-based customers easier and faster access to OLED materials and a stable and more flexible supply chain.

The 900-sqm OLED production plant is located in our Jinqiao hub in Shanghai, and had an initial investment of €9.8 million (CNY 77 million). The plant has introduced the unified-standards production equipment, technological process, digital operating model, quality control systems, as well as energy-saving and emission-reduction technologies from headquarters, covering the entire manufacturing processes from OLED materials purification and sublimation to the quality testing and packaging of finished products. In the future, following its second-phase expansion phase, the plant will have an annual capacity of 6 tons. This is our third OLED materials production site after Germany and South Korea.