OLED market set to boom

The year 2014 will be the one in which OLED lighting begins to generate significant revenues for suppliers of OLED lighting materials, according to a report from NanoMarkets. The report notes that the total market for OLED lighting materials will generate US$1bn in revenues in 2015.

The report is the latest update on the OLED lighting materials market and it quantifies the opportunities that are emerging from the nascent OLED lighting industry. 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.

The report predicts what the latest market and technology developments will mean to the industry overall, and 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.

In the report, the company says that revenues from emissive layer materials are expected to top US$375m by 2015 and over 90% of this will come from sales of vapor-deposited small molecule materials.

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.