Organic Electronics Materials: New Revenues and New Challenges
December 2007
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NanoMarkets has just published a new report - “Organic Harvest: Opportunities in Organic Electronic Materials” and according to our latest numbers this currently “nichey” little business will exceed $1.0 billion in sales for the first time by 2010 and then go on to reach $15.8 billion by 2015.
In doing so it is going to take some interesting new paths. Today, organic electronics materials are all about OLEDs. We think that some 80 percent of materials sold for OE at the present time are for this application. But that is going to change. Coming up fast are OTFT applications in RFID and display backplanes. During 2007, we saw the first tentative steps to the commercialization of both applications. Although the case for neither application has been made fully, OTFTs do seem to be an attractive route to both ultra-low cost RFID tags and flexible backplanes.
By 2012, we expect that organic electronics materials sales into the RFID sector will actually exceed sales of materials into the currently all-important OLED market. Sales into the display backplane sector probably never will exceed OLED materials sales, but we still have great expectations for them. At the moment, display backplanes using organic materials account for under $1 million mostly made up of some pentacene and some plastic substrates. We think, however, by 2015 we will be talking $1.8 billion of materials sold into the organic backplane sector, if the semiconductors, conductors, dielectrics and substrates are all added up.
Not that the OLED market is going to become unimportant for materials makers. This year, 2007, hasn’t been the best of years for the OLED industry. OLEDs have not moved into cell phone main display sector as fast as some people hoped and retooling by display firms in Asia made the second half of 2007 a very poor one for OLED production.
On the other hand, 2007 wasn’t the worst of years for OLEDs either. As we forecast in 2006, we are seeing the beginnings of a new revolution in television in the form of OLED televisions. These are beautiful slim things with vibrant colors that do real justice to HDTV feeds in a way that the LCD displays that came before them could never do.
The good news for the materials firms is that one of these big OLED displays is going to use a lot more OLED materials than hundreds those tiny little OLED displays that are currently used in MP3 players and cell phone sub-displays.
In doing so it is going to take some interesting new paths. Today, organic electronics materials are all about OLEDs. We think that some 80 percent of materials sold for OE at the present time are for this application. But that is going to change. Coming up fast are OTFT applications in RFID and display backplanes. During 2007, we saw the first tentative steps to the commercialization of both applications. Although the case for neither application has been made fully, OTFTs do seem to be an attractive route to both ultra-low cost RFID tags and flexible backplanes.
By 2012, we expect that organic electronics materials sales into the RFID sector will actually exceed sales of materials into the currently all-important OLED market. Sales into the display backplane sector probably never will exceed OLED materials sales, but we still have great expectations for them. At the moment, display backplanes using organic materials account for under $1 million mostly made up of some pentacene and some plastic substrates. We think, however, by 2015 we will be talking $1.8 billion of materials sold into the organic backplane sector, if the semiconductors, conductors, dielectrics and substrates are all added up.
Not that the OLED market is going to become unimportant for materials makers. This year, 2007, hasn’t been the best of years for the OLED industry. OLEDs have not moved into cell phone main display sector as fast as some people hoped and retooling by display firms in Asia made the second half of 2007 a very poor one for OLED production.
On the other hand, 2007 wasn’t the worst of years for OLEDs either. As we forecast in 2006, we are seeing the beginnings of a new revolution in television in the form of OLED televisions. These are beautiful slim things with vibrant colors that do real justice to HDTV feeds in a way that the LCD displays that came before them could never do.
The good news for the materials firms is that one of these big OLED displays is going to use a lot more OLED materials than hundreds those tiny little OLED displays that are currently used in MP3 players and cell phone sub-displays.
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