December 3, 2007 – Rohm and Haas and SKC Co. Ltd. have officially opened their joint venture to make advanced optical and functional films for flat-panel displays, three months after announcing their partnership. Meoung-Han Kim will lead the business, having most recently served as managing director of SKC’s display division.

The new FPD films JV, as described in August, was to involve spinning off SKC’s Korea-based display technologies business into a separate legal entity, with Rohm & Haas investing $190M for a 51% controlling interest. The JV will make and sell a suite of specialty display films for LCD and plasma displays, as well as dispersions of pigments for making LCD color filter resists. The firms projects sales of about $300 million in its first year of operation, increasing to $350M in 2008.

“We have been aggressively expanding our presence in the flat panel market, where we believe the combination of our materials expertise, the deep pipeline of technology from the Kodak Light Management Films acquisition, and the manufacturing capability of SKC Haas will position us extremely well in this growing space,” said Yi Hyon Paik, VP and business group director, Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials, in a statement.

The US company has spent $230M in the past year (including its April 2007 purchase of Eastman Kodak’s light management films business) to create a new business unit in its Electronic Materials group, developing and manufacturing a variety of products for flat-panel displays including TFT photoresists and color filter chrome patterning. Dominic Yang, president/director of Rohm and Haas’ microelectronics technologies business, has been appointed to lead the company’s flat panel display technologies business.