Behind The Scenes – Royale Corporation
From Lab to Market in 7 Yrs: a USD 5-billion-dollar company founded by Stanford alumni stuns the world with its flexible displays and first-ever foldable phones
Sat June 29, 2019 @ Royale Campus, Shenzhen
This event was organized by committee member Andy Fan.
ROYOLE, founded in 2012, is perhaps best known for its pioneering work in creating the world’s thinnest, most flexible and more recently, even bendable electronic screens and flexible devices. Behind this culture of innovation are more than 2,500 global patents and a valuation, for the still-private company, of USD 5 billion, with plans to go public in 2020. The company’s backers include IDG Capital, AMTD Group and Knight Capital, among others.
The company’s track record of innovation has been remarkable.
In 2014, ROYOLE introduced the world’s thinnest full-color flexible display with a thickness of only 0.01mm and a bending radius of 1mm. It followed this with development, in 2015, of one of the world’s first massproduced flexible sensor technology on transparent super-thin, bendable film, 30% thinner and 50% lighter than rigid touch screens. In 2016, the Company introduced Moon, a foldable 3D mobile theater with the category’s highest display resolution and noise-cancelling headphones. In 2018, it introduced FlexPai, the world’s first commercial foldable smartphone with a fully flexible display.
All of this innovation now takes place at the company’s ground-breaking USD 1.7 billion campus where our event’s guests will witness world-class mass production of ROYOLE’s flexible displays.
The ROYOLE journey is not without challenges.
How will ROYOLE compete with giants eyeing the flexible display market, e.g. Samsung, BOE, Xiaomi? Will ROYOLE pull off its multi-product strategy serving both businesses and consumers? Can ROYOLE continue to secure funding in this ultra-capital-intensive industry?
As part of the Chapter’s mission of life-long learning, the Behind the Scenes Program was initiated to give our Membership rare insights on how leading organizations operate from the inside, combining on-site tours with the opportunity for engaged, off-the-record dialogue with senior management.
Event Details
Event Includes: Site visit, presentations by management plus complimentary lunch with CEO, as follows:
| 08:30 | High speed train from West Kowloon to Shenzhen Futian Station |
| 09:00 | Private bus pick-up from Futian Station to ROYOLE campus |
| 10:30 | A private tour at ROYOLE’s state-of-the-Art $1.7B Production Facility: – Witness the mass production of flexible displays in cleanrooms – Learn about the flexible display technologies – Touch and feel ROYOLE’s commercial and consumer products |
| 12:00 | LUNCH Hosted by Bill Liu, Founder, ROYOLE, Stanford PhD, Electrical Engineering |
| 14:00 | Program Conclusion (and transportation back to Futian Station) |
Founder Bio: Chairman & CEO Dr. Bill Liu (Stanford PhD, Electrical Engineering)
In 2012, Bill, together with other Stanford engineering graduates, founded ROYOLE with offices in Fremont, CA, Hong Kong and Shenzhen. ROYOLE’s founder Bill Liu, aged 36, was born and raised in a small city in China’s South-eastern Province of Jiangxi.
Bill was a “child prodigy”. He was the top scorer in the national college entrance examination for the Jiangxi Provide and admitted to the prestigious Tsinghua University at the age of 17, where he received the bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at 21, and master’s degree with honors at 23.
In 2006, Bill went on to study at Stanford for a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, and managed to complete the program in less than three years, a rare achievement. Upon graduation, he worked in New York with IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center and Semiconductor R&D Center.
