What's up at E Ink's Hydis Korean plant?

There's a story over at The China Post regarding E Ink's Hydis plant in Korea. According to the newspaper, Hydis workers are suspecting that E Ink is stripping the company of its assets, wanting to sell its core LCD technology.

I asked E Ink about this, which gave me this statement: "Hydis is an important investment and valuable asset for E Ink Holdings. We are not selling Hydis. The technology invented by Hydis namely FFS (Fringe Field Switching) is the most popular technology adapted by mobile device makers particularly in tablets. We have been licensing our FFS technology to a number of LCD makers. FFS technology from Hydis allows LCD designs that consume less power due to better transmittance, enables high resolution displays with wide viewing angle and color gamut".

E Ink has license agreements on FFS technology with LG Display, Sharp, AUO and others, and we know that those displays are being used in many popular tablets - including Amazon's Kindle and the Nexus one by Google. It seems highly unlikely for E Ink to sell this technology, unless they want to focus on e-paper panels (but that market is currently not very "stable").

Posted: Feb 03,2013 by Ron Mertens