Japan Display (JDI) demonstrated its latest high-resolution (198 PPI) 30cm-wide e-paper displays for the electronic shelf-label market.
JDI is also developing much higher density e-paper displays (400 PPI and 600 PPI), these were detailed at E Ink's booth at SID but JDI did not demonstrate any of these next-gen e-papers at its own booth.
E Ink Holdings announced a strategic collaboration with SES-imagotag, a developer of digital price tags. As part of this collaboration, E Ink invested 26 million Euro in SES, as it aims to expand its presence int he retail IoT market.
E Ink and SES-imagotag have collaborated for years, and implemented E Ink's Tri-color Spectra displays into shelf labels. This new industrial and sales partnership aims to accelerate broader adoption of electronic paper in smart retail applications.
E Ink Holdings (EIH) reported its financial results for Q3 2017, with revenues of $158.8 million (up 7.8% from Q3 2016 and 29.8% from Q2 2017) and a net profit of of $38.8 million.
E Ink says that these excellent results were due to a sharp increase in e-reader and e-paper notebook sales and improvements in operation efficiency and production yields. E-reader and notebook sales accounted for 70% of EIH's revenues.
Visionect recently appointed Sri Pervuemba to its board of directory. Sri is a long time display veteran and was E Ink's chief marketing manager for over 10 years. Sri is also a good friend and has been supporting E-Ink-Info from its launch. Sri was kind enough to answer a few questions we had regarding the e-paper market and Visionect's technology and platform.
But first, an official bio: Sri Peruvemba is the CEO of Marketer International. His 25 years of experience in the electronics industry include marketing LCD, CRT, TFEL, OLED, LED, Plasma and ePaper displays into the consumer, mobile, industrial, medical, signage and TV markets. He earned a BSEE, a MBA and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management. He was previously CMO for E Ink and also held senior level positions at Sharp Corp, TFS Inc., Planar Systems and Suntronic Technology. Peruvemba currently serves as Director on the Board of Visionect Inc., as well as on the board of the Society for Information Display(SID).
E Ink Holdings reported its financial results for Q2 2017. E Ink's revenues were $121 million USD while profit totaled $31 million USD. EIH's gross margin increased from 35.1% in Q2 2016 to 39.5% in Q2 2017.
E Ink expects that electronic shelf labels sales will continue to grow in the rest of 2017. A report from China suggests that E Ink has orders from Amazon, the Alibaba Group and China-based jd.com. The same report also says that e-reader sales are expected to finally grow again as these readers are now entering the Chinese and Indian markets.
Digitimes reports that E Ink Holdings is ramping up its electronic shelf label display (ESL) production as the company expects double-digit growth in 2017. EIH recently began to ship smart label displays to Alibaba Group and JD.com subsidiaries.
E Ink shipped around 30-40 million ELSs in 2016, which is 50% of the total ESL market. Digitimes says that the company hopes to become an ESL supplier to Walmart and Amazon.
E Ink Holdings reported its financial results for 2016, with the first operating profit in five years. The company was still profitable, due to royalty earnings, but now its operations are profitable too - in 2016 operating income was NT$61 million ($2 million USD).
The company's chairman says that the improvement stems from a better product mix, enhanced productivity - and the company's new asset-light policy and divestment from unprofitable business. E Ink quite the LCD market to focus on its e-paper technologies. New sales drivers are e-paper displays, electronic shelf labels and electronic signages. Demand from e-reader remains stable and E Ink actually expects annual growth in that market.
CLEARink announced that it signed a comprehensive materials development agreement with Merck with an aim to bring CLEARink's reflective display technology to the market by the end of 2017.
CLEARink displays are based on a specially designed reflector film that can vary its brightness by modulating the total internal reflection of ambient light from film. The display uses a single electrically charged particle suspended in a liquid. The technology is called TIR (Total Internal Reflection) and the company believes that its manufacturing costs will be lower compared to other reflective display technologies. The displays offer full-color, low power (slightly above E Ink), outdoor readability, low cost and video support (low latency).
E Ink Holdings reported its financial results for Q3 2016. Net income was NT$509 million ($US 16 million), a 35% drop from Q2 2016. This drop in earnings was mostly due to lower patent royalty income from its LCD business.
E Ink is exiting the LCD market, and the company expects that all revenues in 2017 will come from e-paper displays. The company's main growth driver in the next few years will be electronic shelf labels.
Smart Displays offers a new electronic shelf label (ESL) kit to help companies quickly develop ESL solutions. The kit includes three 2.9" Tri-Color (black, white and red) E Ink labels and two 2.1" monochrome E Ink labels. The kit also includes a bar-code scanner that can be used for wireless communication with the labels.
