OLED materials market to reach $3.7bn

The ongoing penetration of OLED displays in mobile phones and wearables, and renewed prospects for the OLED lighting market will catapult the OLED materials market from around $900 million in 2014 to $3.7 billion in 2019, according to NanoMarkets.

By 2019, almost 45% of the materials revenues for OLEDs will come from the core functional materials and the rest will come from electrode, encapsulation and substrate materials, according to the new NanoMarkets report OLED Materials Markets - 2014.

The report covers materials for both OLED displays and OLED lighting and takes into consideration the latest developments in the OLED sector such as Konica Minolta’s ramping up of OLED lighting production and Samsung’s step back from the OLED TV sector. 

The report also provides in-depth analysis of all the leading firms involved in the OLED materials space. There remains a considerable amount of uncertainty over the future of large OLED TVs, especially now that Samsung is having second thoughts about this business. NanoMarkets has reduced its expectations for materials demand in this sector from last year. However, the firm still expects strong growth in the materials consumed by OLED displays, driven by the small to medium-sized AMOLED used in smartphones, tablets and (more recently) wearable devices.

Meanwhile, solution processing of OLED panels is making good progress and increasingly proving that it is well suited to manufacturing OLEDs. Some of the basic problems around solution-processed OLEDs are being solved.

For example, device lifetimes for red and green OLED devices with solution printing processes are now sufficiently long to be of practical use. And several OLED material companies are developing improved soluble materials for the solution-processing techniques. Nonetheless, solution processing still poses challenges with regard to luminance uniformity and current stability.

The market for solution-processed OLED materials is expected to leap from around $40 million in 2014 to $335 million in 2019 (excludes encapsulation, electrodes and substrates).