Konica Minolta and Pioneer Crop. have established Konica Minolta Pioneer OLED, Inc., the joint venture for Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) lighting business.
The new company will take charge of business and product planning, product development, production technology development and marketing functions of both companies' OLED lighting business to drive its initiatives.
With the establishment of the new company, Konica Minolta and Pioneer will accelerate business launch for OLED lighting not only in the existing fields of indicators, advertisement, beauty and medical lighting but also in the new field of automotive lighting.
Konica Minolta has strengths in equipment and mass-production technology for roll-to-roll manufacturing of flexible panels, while Pioneer offers mass-production and market introduction experience for OLED panels, and expertise in the automotive OEM business.
Konica Minolta utilized its core technologies in the commercialization of first OLED lighting panels using all phosphorescent emitters in
2011. The company also announced in 2014 the paper-thin, light-weight and flexible plastic substrate OLED lighting panel with the world's first color tunable function, the thinnest OLED lighting panel, and the white OLED lighting panel the highest luminous efficacy.
Pioneer started mass production and shipment of OLED displays for the first time in the world in 1997. With the development and market launching of OLED displays for car electronics products, the company has sold more than 140 million OLED displays in total and accumulated wealth of OLED-related technologies. In 2012 Pioneer started shipment of first OLED lighting modules with adjustable color and brightness, followed by, in 2014, the first mass production and shipment of the OLED lighting module with a wet coating process for a light-emitting layer that permits significantly lower manufacturing cost.