Liner Notes From NanoMarkets' Webinar on ITO Market Opportunities
Posted by Jade Po Kellard on 22 June 2009 at 06:00
The size of the ITO market is such that even small inroads into this market by ITO alternatives could lead to substantial revenue opportunities, according to a Webinar presented on June 16th, 2009 by NanoMarkets, LC, an industry analyst firm. In this webinar, NanoMarkets discussed the performance of ITO and its alternatives, emerging applications with potential opportunity for non-ITO transparent conductors, as well as market expectations for these materials over the next eight years.
More about the Webinar:
ITO has long been the material that manufacturers of flat-panel displays love to hate. ITO is not very conductive, and as a transparent layer, it's not very transparent. Once applied, it's brittle and therefore not conducive to applications that involve flexing. And finally, the price of this mediocre performance is quite high, because ITO is dependent on indium, which typically garners a high price.
All of this would seem to suggest an environment ripe for alternative materials that boast improved performance. As NanoMarkets warned in its 2008 report, The Future of ITO: Transparent Conductor and ITO Replacement Markets, however, alternatives will make progress but will do so slowly. NanoMarkets' analysis suggests that even by 2016, ITO will still have about 90 percent of the high-end transparent conductor market.
That being said, NanoMarkets believes there is a case to be made for these alternatives to ITO. For one, the markets that ITO serves are quite large and as such even low penetration of these markets will offer large revenue opportunities. In addition, new applications are emerging that magnify ITO's drawbacks. For instance, companies pursuing ITO substitutes see the touch-screen market as a big opportunity; this is not only a large addressable market but one that has an obvious need for a better performing transparent conductor. All one must do to verify this firsthand is walk into a local high-volume retail establishment and attempt to sign on the old, worn-out point-of-purchase display device. ITO cannot stand up to the repeated poking and flexing that is involved with this type of touch screen without deteriorating or cracking.
To quantify this opportunity, NanoMarkets expects the market for ITO to grow from $3.2 billion this year, to $10.9 billion in 2016. Meanwhile, the market for ITO substitutes is expected to grow from about $30 million this year, to almost $940 million in 2016. Such alternatives include other transparent conductive oxides (TCOs), carbon nanotube-based formulations, other nanomaterials, composites, and metals.
In brief, TCOs are an obvious direction to take since they guarantee a cost reduction; unfortunately, TCOs have identical or worse brittleness issues and will never offer the combination of transparency and conductivity offered by ITO. Conductive polymers are inherently flexible, typically can be easily printed, and they cost only a fraction of the price of ITO. An open question is the resilience of this kind of "plastic ITO" when exposed to light in general and UV light in particular. And finally, there's nanomaterials, which share advantages of flexibility, printability, and (usually) cost with organics, and also have a lot of yet-to-be-discovered potential because they are not yet completely understood. Of these ITO alternatives, NanoMarkets sees key long-term opportunities occurring in the nanomaterials sector and the revenues from this type of technology could appear quite quickly in 2010 and beyond.
Most of the revenues for both ITO and its alternatives will come from rigid liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) and other flat-panel displays (FPDs) throughout the forecast period. Touch-screen displays, however, represent about 10 percent of this market-$324 million in 2009, and growing to $1.2 billion in 2016.
As already mentioned, NanoMarkets sees touch-screen displays as a potentially significant opportunity for ITO substitutes. This opportunity will mostly play out in resistive touch screens, which dominate the market. Capacitive touch screens are another story as they do not work by poking with (say) a stylus and therefore are not as vulnerable to ITO's brittleness.
The touch-screens market is not the only game in town for ITO subtitutes. There's OLED lighting, which usually uses ITO for its transparent electrodes. Here, in addition to the usual drawbacks of ITO-cost and lack of flexibility-OLEDs can suffer aesthetic shortcomings due to ITO's fairly low conductivity. As such, NanoMarkets expects ITO to lose share of the OLED lighting market fairly rapidly. In its place will be a variety of substitutes including other TCOs at the low end, as well as conductive polymers, carbon nanotubes, and composites.
About NanoMarkets:
NanoMarkets tracks and analyzes emerging market opportunities in electronics created by developments in advanced materials. The firm has published numerous reports related to organic, thin film and printable electronics materials and applications and maintains a blog at www.nanotopblog.com that comments on industry trends and events. NanoMarkets research database is the industry's most extensive source of information on thin film, organic and printable (TOP) electronics. Visit www.nanomarkets.net for a full listing of NanoMarkets' reports and other services.
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Fortunately even the most conservative most prognosticators now see at least a subdued “recovery” in 2010. 