OLED lighting materials market to hit $1bn in 2015, says NanoMarkets

OLED lighting is expected to generate US$1bn in revenues in 2015, according to industry analyst firm NanoMarkets. The report titled ‘OLED Lighting Materials Markets: 2012’ is the latest update from NanoMarkets on the OLED lighting materials market and it quantifies the opportunities that are emerging from the nascent OLED lighting industry. The report says that 2014 will be the year in which OLED lighting will begin generating significant revenues for suppliers of OLED lighting materials.

The report analyses the strategies of some of the key OLED lighting manufacturers like Philips, Osram, Lumiotec and Visionox, and discusses the impact of their strategies on the materials sector. Finally, the report predicts what the latest market and technology developments will mean to the industry overall.

It also contains detailed volume and revenue forecasts for materials used for OLED lighting broken out by material type and functionality in the OLED stack, as well as by OLED fabrication method - solution processing vs vapour deposition, and small molecules vs polymeric materials.

Among the important issues that the report discusses are the continuing dominance of UDC in important sectors of the OLED lighting market and the increasingly important role of Chinese OLED materials suppliers. It also evaluates the significance of the emergence of solution-processed small molecules and the continuing failure of polymer OLEDs to catch on the marketplace.

In the report NanoMarkets says that revenues from emissive layer materials are expected to top $375m by 2015, and over 90% of this will come from sales of vapour-deposited small molecule materials. And while solution-processable materials still have the potential to revolutionise OLED lighting with respect to increasing throughput and lowering costs, recent setbacks have pushed their impact beyond the timeframe of this report.

In the long run, OLED lighting will eventually emerge as the largest addressable market for OLED materials, believes NanoMarkets. However, there is still a long road ahead before the OLED materials market reaches this point. The report contains detailed volume and revenue forecasts for materials used for OLED lighting broken out by material type and functionality. Additional details about the report are available at http://www.nanomarkets.net/oled_lighting.