Today’s price movement in shares of Universal Display Corp. (“UDC”; NASDAQ: OLED) is being attributed to an announcement by LG Display Co., Ltd. (NYSE: LPL) about production of flexible displays. The announcement is old news, has no tie to UDC revenues, products, inventions or technology. Despite UDC management’s repeated allusion to a potential long-term licensing agreement with LG, such an agreement has never materialized. Increasing investors’ confusion, UDC’s promoters-in-chief at oled-info.com immediately added a number of meaningless statements repeatedly regurgitating Samsung’s supposed announcement of a flexible screen product “within days.”
LG Display’s announcement was a reiteration of news from June about mass production of flexible OLEDs. See here and here. Despite the fact that LG’s plans for flexible OLED production have been in the works and publicly known for some time, UDC has not been able to secure a long-term licensing agreement with LG. According to UDC’s own 10-K, LG’s only purported relationship with UDC involves material purchases without a long-term licensing agreement, and definitely not an agreement involving LG’s development of flexible OLEDs.
Oled-info.com, which promotes UDC religiously, circulated an article today about Samsung’s purported involvement with flexible displays without providing or even referencing a source. According to the oled-info promotional piece, “Samsung will release the first flexible OLED phone… ‘within days.’” Oled-info.com has been publishing articles about Samsung’s supposed future launch of flexible displays for months, without ever referring to a Samsung source. This appears to be nothing more than uninformed promotion designed to feed off of the old-news LG announcement and claim the same product is being produced by UDC’s only material customer, Samsung. Regardless, Samsung already pays a flat licensing fee for rights to ALL of UDC’s patents, according to UDC disclosures.
There are confirmed accounting and disclosure irregularities at UDC that have been the subject of repeated inquiries by the Securities & Exchange Commission. These irregularities create investor confusion about UDC’s alleged invention, the termination of the Samsung agreement, and the expiration of UDC’s key patents. The most material issues for investors are patent office and court decisions that could invalidate UDC’s key patents and when Samsung will decide to pull the plug altogether on its relationship with UDC – not what a blogger says about Samsung based on mysterious, unnamed sources.