From NanoMarkets' report Opportunities for Carbon-based Inks, Pastes and Coatings for Electronics Applications

Carbon inks have been a mainstay of the thick film electronics business for as long as most people can remember.  The established carbon inks are used with silver inks, either to adjust conductivity levels or to reduce costs; carbon, obviously, is priced at a lot less than silver.  And in a period of deflation, especially when this is (paradoxically) combined with high silver prices, NanoMarkets sees a growing opportunity for standard carbon inks to replace silver inks wherever this is technically possible.

But in the long run purely cost-based strategies are inherently based on the idea that what is being sold is no more than a low-margin commodity, which is essentially what the older carbon inks are.   By contrast, inks and pastes based not on these inks, but on new high-conductivity carbon materials; carbon nanotubes and graphene, provide a way forward based on value-added products that potentially at least can offer suppliers attractive margins.

Carbon nanotube inks have been available from a number of vendors for several years. It is especially closely associated with Eikos, which seems to have pioneered the idea. By contrast, graphene inks are very new and have been mostly identified to date with Vorbeck Materials which has developed a graphene-based ink in cooperation with BASF. But today, the revenues from these inks are negligible. However, NanoMarkets believes that five years from now these newer materials will have created reasonable size businesses – $157 million for carbon nanotube inks and pastes and $130 million for graphene.  A few years later, by 2017, we expect carbon nanotube and graphene inks together to account for almost $815 million in revenues.

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See other OLED Lighting research from NanoMarkets.

Although the expectations are that the OLED lighting market will eventually generate billions of dollars in annual revenue, today's revenues from these products are miniscule. Many of the OLED lighting products that are being sold today are intended: (1) to get the message out to designers, rather than create business directly; (2) to get feedback from designers on how to improve the product; and (3) to enable luminaire and consumer products companies to create new value-added products and opportunities, thereby helping to bring into being a market for OLED lighting that has never existed before.

Interim Products: Before the General Lighting Market Takes Off

NanoMarkets' latest analysis suggests that, absent any major economic crises, the OLED lighting market will start to see a transition to "real" products during 2010. By "real" we mean products that are intended to be sold to customers other than designers/architects and not just limited editions or prototypes intended to impress the lighting community at trade shows.

What we are seeing this year is that several firms are starting to ship OLED lighting in sampling volumes. These include GE and Konica Minolta (who are in an OLED lighting partnership), LG (which may have altered its plans since the Kodak acquisition), Showa Denko and Modistech. By next year we expect the product launches to accelerate. Still even then NanoMarkets does not expect the initial volumes shipped of these products to be all that great; no more than perhaps in the hundreds or thousands per item.

And the products being sold at first will be of the luxury or specialty kind. This is because of the technical performance, high pricing and competitive realities of OLED lighting, which mean that for a few more years OLEDs will not be able to chase after the general lighting market. Instead, OLED lighting will first make its mark in areas where there is a premium for novelty and where the price sensitivity is not too great.

Current and Future Pricing of OLED Lighting: Too Expensive for Prime Time

Pricing is everything, of course. At this early stage of market evolution, the price points of OLED lighting products do not come close to being competitive with conventional lighting. In the past year or so, however, several firms have announced pricing for products and in some cases have also said something about future products too.

In our most recent report on OLED lighting, we analyze these announcements in some depth. We note here, however, that the products with the greatest mindshare are "designer kits" from Philips and Osram; two of the world's biggest lighting makers. Osram's Orbeos product is priced at ¬250, while the Philips Lumiblade kit offers an OLED driver and electronics is priced at ¬70, with small pre-shaped OLEDs ranging from ¬72 to ¬248.

Future Products: The Shift to High Volume OLED Lighting Production

The big question - the multi-billion dollar question actually - is when will the OLED lighting industry shift to really high volumes? On the supply side, there are still manufacturing and performance issues that need to be addressed and manufacturing plants capable of delivering high-volume OLED production will need to be constructed. In addition, supply chains need to be established. On the demand side, NanoMarkets believes that for OLEDs to really take off, the impact of regulation essentially banning the incandescent lamp will have to be felt.

At the present time, all indication is that most consumers are not aware that the incandescents are about to go. But by 2013 or so, the general lighting market is likely to be transformed by the changes in regulation and by new products put on the market by lighting firms in response to it. Governments all over the world - but especially in Europe and the U.S - are legislating the phasing out of inefficient light bulbs.

The replacement for incandescents will not all be OLED lighting products, of course, indeed most of them won't be. But, immediately after this 2013 "inflection point" there is a good reason to expect that OLED lighting firms will begin to ship in very large volumes with products that will in some sense compete with regular light bulbs. As an indication of what we might expect out of a moderate sized firm early in this period, we note that Lumiotec has established a pilot mass-production line at a production facility, which by the middle of 2010 will have reached a production capacity of about 40,000 panels per year, with the company beginning mass production by 2013. Organic Lighting, a Japanese OLED start-up, says that it can reach sales of ¥10 billion ($108 million) by 2014, although this does seem quite ambitious from a firm that is just getting started.

NanoMarkets believes that really large volumes of OLED lights will not be shipped until a few years after 2013. This ties in nicely with Osram's expectations that it does not expect to have a high volume OLED lighting product until 2016 and GE's statement that by 2015 it believes that its OLED lights will be both efficient and inexpensive. It is also important to look at this future potential in terms of expected revenues and with this in mind we note that Konica Minolta says that it will reach sales of over ¥100 billion ($1.0 billion) in OLED lighting by its 2017/18 fiscal year. We suspect that few other firms are thinking quite as big as this. Indeed, at the other end of the spectrum, there is Panasonic, which seems fairly pessimistic saying that OLED lights will become widespread as "supplemental lighting" within the next couple of years, but that "it may take about 10 years before they are commercialized as main lighting."

From NanoMarkets' recent report, Thin-Film and Printed Battery Markets

The thin-film/printable battery sector continues to excite the imagination of futurists and journalists because it summons up images of an Internet-of-things, with the things in question being powered by paper-thin batteries.

This is an exciting prospect, but the realities of the thin-film/printable batteries business have so far not proved as rosy as most once hoped.  Many (but by no means all) of the firms active in this space are unfunded or otherwise stretched financially.  Others are pretty close to being science projects. NanoMarkets' estimates for this year's revenues from thin-film/printable batteries is just under $30 million; not impressive for an industry sector that has been around for quite a few years now.

NanoMarkets recent report on this topic, however, suggests that there is considerable hope for the thin-film/printable batteries in the future.  We see especially good prospects for such batteries in the sensors, smart cards and RFID sectors.  However, this is a demand-side analysis and begs the question of whether, how and to what degree firms in the thin-film/printable battery space are able to design strategies to capitalize on the opportunities.

Success in the Thin-Film/Printable Battery Space:  How Four Companies Define Their Strategy

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In our coverage of Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) and thin-film PV including CIGS, we repeatedly see concerns about the cost and supply of indium. Now, these concerns mainly involve grumbling about indium's or ITO's price rather than its availability, especially since the economy collapsed in 2008, and even the cost has been less pressing of an issue since indium fell to the "bargain" price of $300 at that time. But indium prices are now pressing toward $600 a kilogram, and economic growth will certainly push the price up higher.

How high is "higher"? There were fears of $10,000 indium just a few years ago (even though the price topped out just over $1000 in 2005). Those fears are gone, but could they return? And will there be a supply issue as more indium is consumed for ITO and CIGS?

Certainly the fear will return. Because indium supply is slow to develop, there will be some price hikes, and even a return to the $1000 level. But these will be short-term hikes. While some will cry that the sky is falling on indium, producers in China and elsewhere will bring on more capacity to profit from the higher prices while also stabilizing them. And this has already started; as indium prices have crept back up from their lows new indium reserves have also begun being developed; especially in Canada and Australia. Japan's government has even staked out a claim for some of the Australian reserves to support its display industry.

Does NanoMarkets expect $10,000 indium? Not any time soon. $2,000 indium? If so, only briefly. Still, the price volatility we expect will bring about increased interest (and opportunities) in alternatives to ITO, including nanosilver, carbon nanotubes, other TCOs, and conductive polymers. But don't expect ITO to disappear; even as volatility returns the display makers will be very reluctant to abandon a material and process that works. Thus, there will also be plenty of opportunities in indium and ITO, especially in ways of using less (i.e., printing).

As Nanosolar has named a new CEO last week to replace founder Martin Roscheisen, its "customers", companies that have ordered but not yet received billions of dollars worth of solar panels must be getting a little fidgety waiting in line. Half a billion dollars apparently still hasn't made more than a few megawatts of the "cheapest" solar panels in the world. And a management shakeup at this point helps to confirm that all is not on track at Nanosolar.

We wish Mr. Tate, Nanosolar's new CEO, the best of luck in bringing manufacturing to high volume. His background is in semiconductors, not printing, and maybe that's a good thing for Nanosolar. A dose of semi-industry realism may help them develop a process that works in high volume, whether it's the printed process Roscheisen envisioned or not. But NanoMarkets' bets for the CIGS industry are on the more traditional CIGS processes, as carried out by companies like Solyndra and Wurth, to grow the fastest over the next year or two. We also think there's opportunity for electrodeposition a la Odersun, albeit in smaller volume factories but maybe a good inroad for new CIGS entrants and materials suppliers.

In our view, printing remains the underdog now and for the foreseeable future.