Three potential scenarios for OLED lighting

USA: The OLED lighting market continues to evolve from its earliest days of luxury luminaires and show pieces. Most of the industry's observers and participants have been targeting the year 2016 as the year that OLED lighting was to really take off.

Unfortunately though, in the past year the market showed no discernible technical advancements and from the manufacturing standpoint, there has been insufficient progress on bringing yields up and costs down to support OLED lighting's entry into general illumination applications like office lighting.

Production facilities remain insufficient and the economies within both Europe and Japan are severely dampening market prospects. Last but not least, the industry lacks a true market "champion" that will lead the business forward.

While the OLED lighting products business can still surpass $2 billion in revenues by 2020, number of market and technical factors will need to be overcome for this market opportunity to fully emerge. To realize the potential, several challenges remain, including the needs for performance improvements, standardization, cost reductions, capacity expansion, and development of demand-side market pull.

A new report "OLED Lighting Market Forecasts 2013" examines three possible scenarios for the OLED lighting business:

OLED market scenario 1: One or two "champion" firms will emerge (perhaps with government support), make substantial performance and process improvements, and sufficiently expand production capacity to bring costs down to a level that with finally enable penetration of general illumination markets.

OLED market scenario 2: If no champion emerges, costs stay high, and performance lags the competition then OLED lighting will be relegated to specialty, niche-only luxury lighting with a market value unlikely exceeding $500 million in revenues before the end of the decade. This will certainly lead to a large exodus from the business.

OLED market scenario 3: Industry fails to attain any reasonable targets – cost or otherwise – and thus relegating the technology to the dustbin of abandoned "revolutionary" technologies.