The technology gaps in the OLED industry have not gone unnoticed by the materials suppliers, which have been providing steady improvements in performance.  Overall, most clearly needed by the OLED industry are materials used in the functional stack – emitters, hosts, transport and blocking materials, etc. – that enable higher efficiency and longer lifetimes at the right color points to achieve proper color gamut (in displays) or the right color rendering index (CRI) and color temperature (in lighting). 

Obviously, US-based OLED materials pioneer Universal Display Corporation (UDC) and its materials partners are at an advantage here, at least with respect to phosphorescent technologies and the superior efficiency that they can provide, and with respect to customization and optimization of auxiliary materials to be used in conjunction with the phosphorescent materials. 

However, a breakthrough by an outside firm based on non-phosphorescent (or at least not on iridium metal cores) could be quite lucrative to the inventing firm as well. Breakthroughs in any of a number of other materials could also translate into a significant opportunity.

The past year has brought big changes to the OLED market.  The technology appears to have finally taken off, and the long-promised potential for OLEDs to make a real impact in the display markets is finally being realized, with Samsung’s Galaxy phones beating out OLED-free Apple iPhones for the first time in 2012.  Samsung has said that it expects to sell 10 million of its latest Galaxy smartphones by the end of June, and most industry estimates, including ours, indicate that a total of over 200 million smart phones with active matrix (AM) OLED displays will be sold this year.

The PV market is undergoing dramatic change as the industry transitions from one of generous subsidies to one with dwindling subsidies, dramatically reduced prices, reduced margins, and anticipated massive consolidation. As the PV module market shifts towards a commodity business model with associated mergers, and many players are weeded out of the panel area, which dominates the overall solar industry, there are many in the industry looking for new business models with greater opportunities for high margin growth. 

NanoMarkets believes that one of the areas of high growth for solar PV is in building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV).This new wave of BIPV products represents an attractive opportunity for new encapsulation materials.  The current materials for flexible modules are relatively expensive to manufacture compared to the glass used in rigid modules. However, for BIPV applications, where product lifetimes are 20-30 years, they represent a good value proposition for high-end applications today, and will have much wider appeal as costs come down.  The larger opportunities will be in the newest generation of materials, which promise to reduce costs without reducing product lifetimes.

If AMOLEDs cannot be deployed for large-area applications, then, by definition, AMOLEDs cannot replace LCDs as a dominant display technology.  Worse, if AMOLEDs are restricted to small mobile displays then economies of scale for both OLED material manufacture and the production of AMOLEDs themselves cannot kick in, again thwarting high hopes for AMOLED technology. NanoMarkets believes that the technology that will cut through this Gordian knot are backplanes that are based on metal oxide thin-film transistors (TFTs).  Such TFTs will also be sold into the conventional LCD sector and will generate more revenues from LCD applications than for AMOLED applications.  But in the AMOLED sector, they will be more essential and will prove a key enabling technology for AMOLEDs.

NanoMarkets believes that 2012 will be the year that dye sensitized cell (DSC) photovoltaics grows into itself and begins to capitalize on the available opportunities despite overall weakness in the PV market.  In this article we examine a few of the factors that the industry and interested investors may be ignoring.  

While the growth rates in the countries that are likely to be the sources of the overwhelming majority of the demand for OLED lighting will inevitably rise and fall over the next decade, the likelihood is that the high growth rates that existed in the economy when OLED lighting was first thought up are not going to reoccur for some time.

And with that in mind, NanoMarkets believes that it is certainly time to rethink our forecasts for the OLED lighting market in a lower economic growth world going forward.

Over the past several years the photovoltaics (PV) market has been the single largest consumer of silver printing pastes, beating out even the big traditional markets like printed circuit boards and polymer thick-film membrane switches. But as the PV sector enters a period of flat or moderate growth in the next couple of years, the industry remains highly cost sensitive, and government subsidies are waning. Meanwhile, the ongoing shift in market share toward thin-film PV (TFPV) is changing the nature of the addressable market for silver materials in PV.   

There is some good news, however as most of the opportunities center on providing new silver-based products that help the panel makers reduce manufacturing costs.  Examples are: new silver printing pastes with reduced silver loadings that do not sacrifice performance; new printable silver materials that enable the fabrication of finer resolution silver traces; and new nanosilver-based options that enable low-cost, solution-processable and/or printable fabrication of transparent front electrodes.

NanoMarkets continues to believe that there are opportunities for commercialization of smart coatings in the photovoltaics (PV) sector, even though the PV market is quite different today than it was just a year ago, both from an economic and a political perspective.

NanoMarkets' eight-year forecasts suggest that the market for transparent conductors (TCs) in both inorganic and organic thin-film photovoltaics (TFPV) applications will be about $90 million in 2012 and grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 30 percent to a value of over $635 million by the end of the forecast period in 2019. NanoMarkets anticipates this growth despite the current difficult overall environment for PV, in which government subsidies are under threat and in which there are huge pressures to reduce TFPV costs to make TFPV competitive with c-Si PV and with other sources of energy in general.

Building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) is one of the biggest hopes for turning PV into a substantial industry that might eventually be self-sustaining without government subsidies.