Paul Gluckman

OLED microdisplay supplier eMagin had an 8% Q3 revenue decline, partly due to completing a project under a contract with a tier 1 consumer tech company that will become active again in Q4, said CEO Andrew Sculley on a Thursday investor call. “We completed the wafer design for this company and it is now being fabricated at a foundry,” he said. “We anticipate receiving these newly designed wafers in early Q2 and then we'll begin to directly pattern the OLED." The customer’s goal is to commercialize an augmented- or virtual-reality headset for the consumer electronics business, he said. He thinks "this market will take off is because we talked to the companies themselves who are interested.” Companies are shopping eMagin because they “want the next generation to be a display that has no screen door effect,” he said. That’s a mesh-like appearance when gaps between pixels can be seen on-screen. “The companies that we're dealing with certainly are pushing us very hard to get these things done quickly,” he said. "There's great belief in consumer electronics companies that this is a path forward.” The stock closed 15.7% lower Thursday at $1.13.

As Qualcomm starts to deploy 5G in the automotive sector over the next 12-18 months, “we are seeing really a complete overhaul in terms of how automakers are thinking about the connectivity portion of electronics in their vehicle,” said Nakul Duggal, senior vice president-general manager, automotive, at a virtual Deutsche Bank investor conference Wednesday. “The antennas have to be designed differently,” he said. “You basically have to have four different antenna elements for transmit and receive that requires the car design to change to be able to accommodate that type of capability. The location of where you put the modem becomes important because of the distance from the antenna.” The electronics need to be “closer to the roof line” to prevent signal loss, he said: “This is really a major architectural shift for a lot of different automakers.” That expands Qualcomm's role from the supplier of the semiconductors “to become kind of the adviser for the system platform for the automaker,” he said.

With COVID-19's “harsh” worldwide impact, Himax had a 28% Q3 revenue increase sequentially, said Chief Investor Relations and PR Officer Eric Li on a Thursday call. “The unceasing stay-at-home economy created new demand but pushed foundry capacity constraints to a more severe level.” Revenue growth in display drivers for TVs, tablets, smartphones and the automotive sector contributed to the “better-than-guided sales,” he said. Smartphone display drivers were “the best performing product category,” rising 154% sequentially and 101% year over year, said Li. The “significant” quarterly sequential growth was a continuation from Q2, “when the product category already grew 69.0% from the previous quarter,” he said. The industrywide wafer foundry shortage stunted additional growth, he said: “We were, and still are, unable to meet all the demand for these products.” Revenue from tablet display driver ICs soared 336% from Q3 2019, setting a record for the third straight quarter, said Li. “We expect our tablet segment sales to continue to grow as overall market demand for tablets remains robust for more home working and online education needs.” Himax secured with foundry partners “a capacity which is already larger than our total shipment for this year,” said CEO Jordan Wu. “We are developing additional capacities for various product areas with an aim to further our available foundry pool for the next few years."

DivX’s Sept. 10 International Trade Commission complaint alleging infringement of four adaptive bit rate streaming patents (see 2009160052) is “unfounded,” Realtek responded (login required) Monday in docket 337-TA-1222. Commissioners voted Oct. 14 to open an investigation (see 2010140042). Also responding are LG, MediaTek, MStar, Samsung and TCL. The ITC should deny “in its entirety” any relief DivX seeks, including exclusion and cease and desist orders, said Realtek. DivX’s complaint is “not factual,” said the chipmaker: The infringement allegations are “baseless and should be withdrawn." DivX didn’t respond to questions Tuesday.

Cloud service providers need to better coax creators to move their content production to the cloud, Microsoft Azure Media and Entertainment Chief Technology Officer Hanno Basse told a SMPTE 2020 virtual conference keynote Tuesday. Azure embarked on a “customer listening tour” with “well-prepared survey questions,” canvassing nearly four dozen “top creators” in the film and TV industry, said Basse, CTO at 20th Century Fox Film before its sale to Disney and ex-founding president of the UHD Alliance. He joined Microsoft in April. The survey's goal was to give Azure a “good, wholesome picture” about the creative industry’s cloud “expectations,” using that feedback to better “inform” its product development process, he said. Azure heard from creators that cloud vendors “need to do a better job of actually raising awareness as to what cloud production actually means and the benefits that it brings,” said Basse. An important part of that is “total cost of ownership,” he said. Creators told Azure “security and access control” are fundamentally important cloud requirements, he said. It heard from “people in the trenches” that there’s a constant “tug of war” between personnel on the set and studio heads about “what they want to make available to the studio executives,” he said. “Not every day is perfect on set, so there needs to be a way of not exposing everything that goes on there.”

Cloud communication is becoming a “core tenet of business continuity” with a “substantial part” of the global workforce working from home, said RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis on a Q3 call Monday. Strong RingCentral adoption continued, “as our customers are going through their digital transformation journeys,” he said. Revenue rose 30% year over year to $304 million, including a 33% subscription revenue increase to $280 million. The company raised its 2020 subscription revenue growth guidance to 31% from 28%. The company added Mignon Clyburn to its board (see personals section, this issue).

Qualcomm has “line of sight” into 5G smartphones that will launch next year or in 2022, and it estimates more than 700 models are in the design pipeline, President Cristiano Amon told an Axios webinar Tuesday. OEMs are making "significantly" more requests of Qualcomm for new “capabilities in artificial intelligence processing on the devices,” he said. “As you have the high-speed connectivity on 5G and the ability to communicate with the cloud 100% of the time, you’re also bringing the possibility of doing a lot of machine learning.”

Intelsat’s $400 million buy of Gogo's commercial aviation connectivity business (see 2009010001) remains on track for closing by the end of Q1, said Gogo CEO Oakleigh Thorne on a Q3 investor call Monday. The transaction cleared the Hart-Scott-Rodino process and awaits approval from the FCC and Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., plus one foreign telecom regulatory OK, he said. Q3 revenue in Gogo’s commercial aviation business, accounted for as discontinued operations, declined 61% from the 2019 quarter, but was up 34% from Q2. Pfizer’s announcement Monday that its COVID-19 vaccine was found to be more than 90% effective in Phase 3 trials “bodes very well for a rebound of the commercial aviation industry next year,” said Thorne.

CTA President Gary Shapiro and Jason Oxman, CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, expressed hope Monday that President-elect Joe Biden’s bipartisan skills would bring progress on high-skilled immigration and infrastructure initiatives in Congress. President Donald Trump hasn't conceded.

Starz had its best-ever quarter for over-the-top subscriber growth, said Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer on a fiscal Q2 investor call Thursday. The quarter ended Sept. 30. Starz U.S. streaming subs increased to 9.2 million from 7.4 million in Q1 “on the strength of a focused content strategy and the launch of successful new series,” he said. The new shows are “driving subscriber growth,” plus “boosting subscriber retention with record levels of engagement,” he said. Starz had a record-high 13.7 million global streaming subscribers at the end of Q2, reaching its full-year target of 13 million to 15 million subs “a full six months early,” he said. The stock closed 10.5% higher Friday at $7.78.