At the Sunic System shareholders' meeting, the first greetings of the CEO began with "I apologize." This was due to the company’s sluggish earnings and share price. This year, the OLED display market is expected to boom and the CEO promised to demonstrate the company’s capabilities.
Park Jae-Gyu, CEO of Sunic System, said at the second general shareholders' meeting after listing on the KOSDAQ on the 25th, "I am sincerely apologizing to shareholders for not making a return on the fruits of the performance. The OLED display market last year was significantly stagnant compared to the beginning of the year."
The Sunic System, which had been listed in 2017 with a public offering price of 37,000 won, recorded 123.5 billion won in sales and operating profit of 14.5 billion won in the same year. The closing price of the last trading day before the meeting was 9,100 won. Compared with the price at the time of the listing, it has been cut to a quarter of that price.
Last year's sales were 117.9 billion won, down 4% from the previous year. Operating profit plummeted 41% to 8.5 billion won. Before the listing, Sunic System's annual sales and operating profits in 2016 were 143.7 billion won and 23.3 billion won, respectively.
CEO Park said, "The market dominance of research and development (R & D) equipment is getting stronger in the global market, and we are investing in the development of customers and micro OLED deposition equipment to preoccupy the next display market." He added, "This year, OLED investment is active, so we expect to show our ability that we have been preparing."
On this day, Sunic System announced that it has signed a contract to supply OLED research equipment to Duksan NeoLux. The contract amount is 4.7 billion won. Earlier this year, the company announced that it will supply OLED research equipment to Samsung Display and Merck Group in Germany. The contract amounts were 6.1 billion won and 2.9 billion won respectively
An official of Sunic System said, "Research equipment and micro OLED equipment were stronger than OLED mass production equipment last year. We are delivering micro OLEDs to Chinese companies." Micro OLEDs are technologies that use silicon wafer-based CMOS processes as backplanes to reduce pixel size. It is expected to be used mainly for virtual/augmented reality devices because it can realize higher density pixels than general display.
Sunic System has delivered 6G (half-cut) OLED deposition equipment to LG Display's E5 plant and entered full-scale OLED display production line. However, after that, at the E6 plant, which LG Display built for the Apple supply line, Canon Tokki evaporators from Japan were fully applied due to Apple's request.
A Sunic System official said, "We know that the E5 plant is working well, but the E6 plant is having difficulty in improving the yield." However, it is said that small OLED panels, which were delivered to Huawei in China and raised quality problems, were produced at the E5 factory.
The proportion of exports and domestic sales of Sunic System sales has been reversed since 2017. For the third quarter of 2018, the exports and domestic demand accounted for 65% and 35% of cumulative sales, respectively. A Sunic System official said, "China accounts for 40 to 50% of the total sales."