Vertical Divider

AVIC Funds Next Phase of Tianma’s 6th Gen Flexible Fab  
June 11, 2018

AVIC International Holdings the parent of Tianma Microelectronics announced that Tianma Micro’s holding company has forwarded $1.3b to the Wuhan project to begin the process for building out the 2nd phase of the company’s Gen 6 flexible OLED fab, with the remaining $936m for the project to come from bank loans.  The phase 2 project is stated to be 22,500 sheets/month, which is larger than the 15,000 sheets/month, and will push the total for the Wuhan fab from 30,000 sheets/month to 37,500 sheets/month, 25% higher than expected. While the project is stated at 24 months to completion, the initial construction and outfitting will be completed a bit more quickly and the time to reasonable utilization rates and product yields will be better than the phase 1 project, which is just getting ready to for MP.  Using a 20 Phase 2 production should begin starting in late 1Q 2020.  While the larger capacity of the fab on completion would go toward what has the potential to be a somewhat oversupplied market for small panel flexible OLED, the date push-out will help to increase demand as more smartphone brands migrate toward flexible substrates over time.