Thin Film Electronics (ThinFilm) has announced their fourth quarter financial report for 2015, and preliminary full-year results. Thinfilm’s revenue and other income in 2015 amounted to US$ 4,413 thousand. Excluding the other income recognized in the period, total revenue was US$ 4,005 thousand, an increase of US$ 16 thousand, or 0.4%, compared to total revenue in 2014 (2014: US$ 3,989 thousand).
Sales revenue amounted to US$ 2,214 thousand in 2015, compared to US$ 1,849 thousand in 2014, and was largely related to product deliveries, technology access fees, product development projects, and delivery of prototypes and products to strategic customers and partners.
During 2015, Thinfilm began mass-production of wireless tags for electronic article surveillance, shipping over 10M units during the year, and launched NFC wireless products in Q1-15, with pilot deliveries of NFC OpenSense labels to lead customers in several verticals, including wines, spirits, and medical products starting in Q4-15.
Thin Film Electronics reports financial results for Q4 2015 US$ ,000)
| Financials | 2015 Q4 |
2014 Q4 |
2015 FY |
2014 FY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sales | 989 | 514 | 2,214 | 1,849 |
| Others operating | 485 | 686 | 1,791 | 2,140 |
| Other income | 125 | (11) | 408 | 490 |
| Revenues - Total | 1,599 | 1,189 | 4,413 | 4,479 |
| Operating Costs | (10,859) | (8,633) | (34,664) | (28,970) |
| Operating Profit(loss) | (9,718) | (7,822) | (31,788) | (25,796) |
| Net (loss) Income | (9,350) | (7,689) | (29,382) | (25,096) |
| Net per share - basic($) | (0.02) | (0.02) | (0.05) | (0.05) |
Outlook
Thin Film Electronics is developing technology that is expected to be critical to the extension of the Internet of Things to ordinary objects. Thinfilm’s NFC OpenSense and SpeedTap labels communicate wirelessly with appropriately configured NFC-enabled smartphones, and can be applied to consumables and other disposable objects.
The inclusion of NFC in smartphones increased dramatically in 2015, and according to NFC Forum, there are now 1 billion smart phones with NFC, and the number is expected to increase to 2 billion in 2016.
In addition, applications well beyond payments are now being introduced, and most major OEM smartphone manufacturers are now members of NFC Forum, including Samsung and Apple, where Thinfilm continues to chair the Retail sub-committee.
During 2015, Thinfilm began mass-production of wireless tags for electronic article surveillance, shipping over 10M units during the year, and launched NFC wireless products in Q1-15, with pilot deliveries of NFC OpenSense labels to lead customers in several verticals, including wines, spirits, and medical products starting in Q4-15.
Thinfilm’s NFC labels are distinguished by their exceptional speed, less than 10 ms for full read, their ability to identify whether a product package has been opened, and by the fact that each label is encoded during production with a unique identifier or URL, which prevents hacking and spoofing.
Thinfilm plans to continue to increase production capacity, which currently allows seven-figure monthly production of NFC labels and multi-million monthly production of EAS tags, to reach an overall 40-million annual unit production capacity, based on NFC label equivalents, in Q2-16.
The process of migrating transistor manufacturing from sheet-based to roll-based PDPS production has progressed.
Initial engineering design is now completed, and vendor selection and site selection commenced.
By accelerating the transition to roll-to-roll printed electronics manufacturing, Thinfilm expects to be prepared to support up to a billion unit annual production volume in 2018, and in parallel, will look to partner with scale-up qualified industrial companies to maintain its low-capex business model, as exemplified by its Thinfilm memory partnership with Xerox.