PRINTING ELECTRONICS REPORT December 2007

Market Study NanoMarkets is offering a new report on organic materials that predicts that currently "nichey" OLEDs will exceed $1.0 billion in sales by 2010 and then go on to reach $15.8 billion by 2015. But it is going to take some interesting new paths. Today, organic electronics materials are all about OLEDs. NanoMarkets thinks that some 80% 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, they 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, they expect that printed 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. NanoMarkets thinks, 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. Source: NanoMarkets.