What Does the Decline of Plasma Displays and Rise of Flexible Displays and OLEDs Mean for Silver?

The market for silver inks and pastes in one important sector – plasma display panels (PDPs) – is almost certainly in a period of slow and steady decline.  We do not anticipate that this market will completely disappear, but it is facing serious challenges. The latest LCDs rival the performance of PDPs in almost every characteristic important to the consumer, and this means that PDPs are now competing primarily on price.

Will the Nanosilver Ink Revolution Ever Happen?

Will nanosilver ever become a major factor in the printed circuitry market? It has long been touted as having a big future in (currently nonexistent) novel “printed electronics” applications, but this has yet to be proven. The market pull for printed electronics has just never materialized in a meaningful way. Nanosilver ink makers have had a hard time of it as they have chased after new markets that do not really exist yet.

Printable nanosilver makers claim other seemingly compelling advantages over conventional silver inks and pastes, too. These include lower temperature processing and less usage precious silver. But nanosilver-based inks and pastes have been around for nearly a decade now, and they have yet to take off in the conventional printed silver markets.  What is behind the lack of progress?

Flexible Glass in the Display Industry

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.

Thin-Film and Printable Batteries:  Strategies for the Future

While revenues from the thin-film/printable battery market are negligible right now, NanoMarkets’ analysis believes they could reach over a $1.0 billion by 2015.  However, this encouraging forecast begs the question of how battery firms can best tap into this opportunity.  With this in mind, this article describes the strategies that thin-film/printable battery firms are and should adopt to penetrate their addressable markets.