By Yu Yezi
Three Chinese entrepreneurs who quit secure, well-paid jobs to build China’s first homegrown OLED evaporation machine have helped break a Japanese monopoly that had dominated the sector for almost two decades, paving the way for China’s rise in advanced display manufacturing.
For years, Japan’s Canon Tokki held an almost unassailable position in the global market for OLED evaporation equipment — highly specialised machines that are essential to producing OLED panels used in smartphones, foldable displays and high-end televisions.
The equipment is among the most technically demanding and expensive tools in the display industry. Industry reports have estimated that Canon Tokki’s latest-generation systems can cost more than $1 billion, making them even more expensive than some advanced lithography machines.
Chinese display makers, however, struggled even to gain access to the technology. Before 2018, they were rarely able to purchase new machines from the Japanese group, which prioritised South Korean customers such as Samsung Display and LG Display. Instead, they relied on refurbished second-hand production lines retired by Korean manufacturers, paying between 400 million yuan ($58.8 million) and 600 million yuan for each recycled machine.
China’s OLED bottleneck
Even maintenance was tightly controlled. Chinese customers often lacked permission to repair the systems independently because of software restrictions and had to rely on engineers from the original supplier.
This dependence became a strategic vulnerability for China’s fast-growing display industry.
“It was a genuine choke point,” said Wang Yanjun, a veteran of China’s optoelectronics industry who had witnessed repeated production stoppages caused by equipment shortages and failures.
In 2013, Wang joined forces with Zhang Haitao, a former executive at Chinese display giant BOE Technology, and Liu Zhengyong, a former researcher at a Japanese multinational, to found equipment maker Fuyang Sineva. The trio believed China needed to master core semiconductor-adjacent technologies if it wanted to compete globally in advanced manufacturing.
Initially, the company focused on lower-cost industrial transfer and cleaning robots to accumulate technical expertise and financial resources. Only later did it turn to the far more ambitious challenge of OLED evaporation systems.
Building a machine from scratch
The task was formidable.
OLED evaporation equipment operates in ultra-clean vacuum environments and deposits microscopic layers of organic material onto glass substrates with extreme precision. Tiny errors in temperature control, alignment or deposition uniformity can ruin an entire display panel.
At the time, China had little existing expertise in the field.
Fuyang Sineva’s early engineering team was assembled from specialists in automation, mechanics and optoelectronics. They had no reference designs, no prototype machines and limited funding. Industry sceptics dismissed them as an improvised ragtag army chasing an impossible dream.
The team spent years grappling with unstable temperature controls, shortages of imported materials and uneven film formation. Engineers worked around the clock in laboratories, repeatedly recalculating deposition paths and testing production parameters.
Technical breakthrough
The company eventually developed its own heating system capable of limiting temperature deviations to within 0.5C. It also refined deposition precision to around 1.5 microns — surpassing the roughly 3-micron accuracy claimed for some leading Japanese systems at the time.
In 2017, Fuyang Sineva unveiled China’s first domestically developed G1 OLED evaporation machine, marking a breakthrough in upstream display equipment. By 2019, it had launched a G2.5 production-scale system capable of supporting mass manufacturing.
The breakthrough coincided with China’s broader push to localise advanced manufacturing supply chains amid growing concerns about foreign technological dependence.
Domestic display makers quickly benefited. Chinese panel manufacturers used localised equipment to reduce investment costs and improve operational stability. Industry data cited by Chinese media suggest that BOE cut investment costs on its Gen 8.6 OLED production lines by about 30% using domestic equipment.
China’s OLED industry has since expanded rapidly. According to industry figures, Chinese manufacturers accounted for 50.7% of global OLED panel production capacity in 2024, overtaking South Korea for the first time.
Giving China a global voice
Yet Fuyang Sineva’s founders argue that replacing imported technology is only part of the objective, they also want Chinese equipment to have a global voice.
The company is now attempting to apply its vacuum deposition expertise beyond displays and into solar technology, particularly perovskite solar cells — an emerging photovoltaic technology seen as a potential next-generation alternative to silicon panels.
In 2023, it delivered a gigawatt-scale perovskite evaporation system. In 2025, it shipped what it described as the world’s first medium-to-large flexible roll-to-roll perovskite evaporation machine.
The company remains unprofitable, reflecting the heavy investment demands of advanced manufacturing. But it has attracted strong backing from state-linked investors and local authorities in Hefei, the eastern Chinese city that has emerged as a major hub for semiconductor and display manufacturing
Government-backed funds, including Hefei Industrial Investment and Anhui High-tech Investment, have provided multiple rounds of financing, while local authorities supplied land and infrastructure for industrial facilities.
Fuyang Sineva is now developing more advanced Gen 8.6 OLED evaporation systems, competing in a market where foreign suppliers still dominate much of the high-end equipment segment. China’s localisation rate for front-end OLED production equipment remains below 20%, with key tools such as lithography and etching systems still heavily reliant on imports.
But for Wang and his co-founders, the evaporation machine has already become symbolic of something larger: China’s determination to challenge entrenched technological monopolies in advanced manufacturing.
Source:
Ultimate Business (最商业)
