Flexible Glass in the Display Industry

Published: October 27, 2011    Category: Advanced Materials Electronics and Devices

As we discuss in some detail in our report on flexible glass, intrinsically flexible displays would seem like a potentially very strong market for flexible glass which seems to offer precisely what is needed for both encapsulation and substrates in this sector.  However, the flexible display market has been so disappointing for so many years that we are reluctant to project a very optimistic forecast for this sector any time soon.  Nonetheless, it cannot be ignored entirely, especially since Samsung says that it is getting into this business.  In addition, as we discuss earlier in this report, there seems to be some good reasons why rollable displays might actually take off in the marketplace eventually.  Within the instrinsically flexible display sector, we need to consider OLED displays and e-paper displays separately.

The use of flexible glass to lower the weight in the FPD sector is an interesting development because the FPD market represents such a large part of the display market that even a relatively small penetration of the market by flexible glass could create a sizeable market and this is also a market that is being specifically targeted by suppliers of flexible glass, which is encouraging.  Since there is no usage of flexible glass in the FPD market at the present time, it is difficult to know what penetration to attribute in this segment and in the market penetration that we have attributed here, we believe that we are being fairly conservative.  Presumably the primary motivation for using flexible glass in the FPD sector would be to lower the weight of displays

The use of flexible glass in the touch screen market is a real possibility too; here we are talking about the use of flexible glass for the touch sensors themselves.  Encouraging signs are that touch displays are a rapidly growing market and that the manufacturers of touch displays seem to be quite open to new technologies and materials

The R2R sector is targeted by many flexible glass makers for first revenues and much of this report is devoted to showing that a strong case can be made for this strategy.  However, we have been quite cautious in terms of our assumptions about forecasts in the Exhibit on the grounds that it always takes longer than one thinks to get new technologies into the marketplace.  Indeed, the history so far of flexible glass has been a testimony to this. 

On the other hand, glass substrates by far the most familiar kind of substrate in the display industry and much the same kind of thing can be said about glass encapsulation.

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