In the next few years, smart coatings will take a great leap forward in “smartness,” as many relevant R&D programs begin to produce viable commercial products. The smartness of coatings is, in fact, now reaching a point where they are going to be (1) much more useful than ever before and (2) much longer lived.  Both these trends will open up new addressable markets for smart coatings — a class of coatings that include self-healing, self-cleaning, self-layering coatings and other coated smart materials.

Biggest and Fastest Growing

According to NanoMarkets’ latest report on this topic (see: http://nanomarkets.net/market_reports/report/smart-coatings-markets-2015-2022) sales of these high value-added products will reach well over $600 million this year ramping up to $5.8 billion by 2020.  This represents average annual growth of around 57 percent compared to 2015.  A few market segments are going to do a lot better than this. 

For example, according to NanoMarkets estimates, the consumer electronics industry will be the fastest growing consumer of smart coatings.  Today consumer electronics uses hardly any smart coatings, but purchases of such materials will generate $225 million by 2020, with much of those revenues being derived from self-healing coatings designed to combat scratches and other physical damage, as well as a variety of coatings designed to improve human-computer interfaces (HCIs) such as touch screens.  

We are at once wary yet still guardedly optimistic about OPV's prospects materializing within our eight-year forecast period. While we peg the OPV market value at next to nothing today, we expect it will quickly ramp up through the midrange and toward the end of our forecast period: $129 million by 2019, and $517 million by 2022. Largely this is based on assumptions that today's fledgling pilot production efforts and proposed full-scale factory plans (starting with Heliatek) will indeed proceed on proposed schedules without further significant delays.

The current generation of cadmium-based QDs will continue to be a cause of concern due to the critical environmental and health hazards. While cadmium-based QDs are of greatest concern in biomedical applications, the display and lighting industry is not ignoring this issue. As mentioned above, there has been a concerted effort to make a paradigm shift to non-heavy metal-based QDs that are relatively less toxic in nature.

OLEDs are another opportunity that NanoMarkets sees that TC firms can pursue.  ITO is used almost exclusively in OLEDs at the present time, but there is a consensus that alternative TCs might do a better job, because ITO is not well suited to use with active OLED materials or with large panels such as OLED TVs and lighting.  In addition, OLEDs seem to represent an opportunity for alternative TCs, because, unlike LCDs, this sector has yet to adopt a mature manufacturing infrastructure.  By contrast, as we note throughout this report, LCD manufacturing has established manufacturing processes and materials; it won’t let go of ITO easily.

The future for TCs in the solar-panel sector depends heavily on the future of the PV industry generally and of the thin-film PV (TFPV) sector in particular.  TFPV is especially important because it makes use of a disproportionate amount of transparent conductor.   So a swing back to using crystalline silicon panels would be bad news for the TC sector.

TC firms—as far as we can tell—have never seen the solar sector as one of the most attractive opportunities, primarily because it is much more cost sensitive than the display sector and always will be.  Also the largest share of the solar panel industry—CSi panels—has minimal needs for TCs.  However, TC firms were attracted to this sector by the fact that (1) it was growing very fast and (2) wasn’t stuck on ITO; indeed it had largely abandoned it.
The state of the PV sector:  Most of the positive assessments that the TC sector made for solar seem to have been shattered recently; the solar panel industry has gone through major ups and downs in the past few years.  After a few years of boom, the industry succumbed to a bout of major price cutting begun as the result of Chinese industrial policy, which in the end hurt Chinese firms too.  However, according to most accounts the PV sector is on the mend, although growth in this sector will probably be in the (high) single digits for the next few years.  So this is good news for the TC industry in a generalized sort of way.

Despite the growing interest in the lighting industry in QDs as a possible next step beyond LEDs, manufacturers and the scientific community have yet to make any significant impact in the QD lighting space. Thus, QD manufacturers need to scientifically establish and cross the cost-benefit barrier established by LEDs in order to be competitive in the lighting segment.

NanoMarkets believes that, given the right incentives, QD lighting solution providers have the potential to come up with innovative and cost-effective fabrication techniques for the production of commercial products. NanoMarkets also feels that the significant regulatory push towards rapid adoption of LEDs in the coming years will create an ideal market for QD-based lighting solution providers.