E Ink Holdings Inc (元太科技) is the world’s leading supplier of electronic ink displays, the kind you find in e-readers. The company has just lowered its growth forecast for 2026, blaming the postponement of new device launches, e-readers included.
TL;DR: E Ink, the company behind almost every e-ink screen on the market, has cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast from 20-25% down to 10-15%. The reason: memory chip prices shot up, which pushed the price of older e-readers higher and killed demand for them, and led brands to postpone the new models that were supposed to launch this year. The rest of E Ink’s business (electronic shelf labels and other IoT products) is still growing at 20-25%, so this is an e-reader problem, not an e-ink problem. The company’s actual results are solid: net profit up 26% year over year and a 58.7% gross margin. The good news is that the delayed devices are postponed, not canceled, so we may see them in 2027.
One important caveat: the company’s results are not bad, far from it. In the second quarter, net profit rose 26% year over year to NT$3.73 billion (roughly $120 million), and the gross margin remains very comfortable at 58.7%. What has been lowered is the forecast for annual revenue growth: E Ink now expects 10 to 15% growth in 2026, compared with the 20 to 25% it was hoping for until now.
That hope rested largely on the transition from black-and-white electronic ink screens to color.
We have all noticed it: color e-ink screens are showing up in more and more e-readers. Pushing those screens, which are more expensive, is a deliberate choice by E Ink to improve its margins. And if you are wondering why e-readers cost so much, I recommend reading this article on the subject.
In 2026, E Ink and the e-reader brands ran into a problem the entire electronics and tech industry knows well: a dramatic increase in the price of memory components.
The consequence was twofold for the e-reader and digital notebook industry:
- prices on older models went up, so demand for those previous generations eroded;
- the new e-readers that were supposed to ship in 2026 were pushed back by E Ink’s own customers.
E Ink chairman Johnson Lee (李正昊) summed up the situation at the company’s earnings conference in Taipei: the consumer segment of e-readers and digital notebooks is seeing a double-digit revenue decline. As a direct result, the third quarter, usually E Ink’s peak season, will not be that this year; the fourth quarter will.
The rest of the business, on the other hand, is doing well. E Ink is holding on to a 20 to 25% growth forecast for its “Internet of Things” division, driven by the adoption of electronic shelf labels by large American and European retailers. In other words, it is the e-reader that is the problem, not electronic ink in general.
These figures were officially released by E Ink at its earnings conference on August 13, 2026: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2026/08/14/2003862450
But we can also extrapolate. The signs that the e-reader world is changing have been there for months, and some companies are really struggling, like reMarkable, yet there are also signs of good health.
First, Kobo has announced a new product, and Amazon also looks ready to offer at least new versions of its Kindle in Europe (with a replaceable battery).
Finally, and this is more of a personal take, I think pushing color electronic ink the way E Ink is doing today has been a letdown for a lot of people who were hoping to get smartphone or tablet display quality on an e-reader. Colors are still fairly dull, even in 2026, on the latest color e-ink technology available. So the massive move to color drove e-reader prices up without necessarily making sales take off.
The good news in all of this is that the launches E Ink mentioned are not canceled, just postponed: the e-reader and digital notebook models expected this year should therefore arrive later, and we can even hope to see them in 2027.
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