YAMAGATA (Kyodo) Yamagata University professor Junji Kido, the inventor of the first white organic electroluminescence diode, and his allies said Wednesday they have established a company to commercialize organic EL technology with a range of lights.
The company, Organic Lighting, capitalized at ¥12.8 million, was set up at the university's Venture Business Laboratory in Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture.
The new company will seek to put organic EL diode-based lighting equipment on the market at the beginning of 2010. Yoshihide Goto, Kido's business partner and president of Goto Denshi Co., has assumed the presidency of Organic Lighting.
Kido told a news conference, "We would like to create a new type of lighting equipment that the world has never seen before." The company aims to post sales of several billion yen by 2014, he said.
The firm will not set up its own factory. It will entrust suppliers with manufacturing components and plans to ask small and midsize companies to assemble the lighting equipment, using only firms in the prefecture.
The firm also envisions developing organic EL-based emergency lights for use in public and commercial facilities.
An organic EL display is a light emitting diode whose emissive electroluminescent layer is composed of a film of organic compounds. The compounds, which emit light when an electric current is applied, have been incorporated into next-generation TVs.