Markets for OLED encapsulation - 2011

GLEN ALLEN, USA: NanoMarkets announced the release of its latest market report on OLED materials titled, "Markets for OLED Encapsulation – 2011."

In the report NanoMarkets ties the opportunities for OLED encapsulation suppliers to the emergence of OLED lighting. And while NanoMarkets predicts a modest but still significant market potential for OLED encapsulation of approximately $170 million ($US) in the year 2016, this time period will also coincide with the emergence of OLED lighting as a volume market leading to significant upside for encapsulation suppliers.

In this new report, NanoMarkets analyzes and quantifies the opportunities for encapsulation suppliers in the fast-growing OLED market. We examine the product development and marketing strategies of the major players in the OLED encapsulation materials sector, from large multinationals like 3M, DuPont and Corning to specialty firms like Tera Barrier Films, and we also attempt to indicate which are the "companies to watch" and which will be the likely winners and losers in the encapsulation materials space. Finally, this report contains detailed, eight-year forecasts of the OLED encapsulation market broken out by product type and by OLED application.

OLED firms are beginning to recognize that high quality encapsulation is an area of strategic importance. NanoMarkets believes that we are now seeing some real opportunities for the firms that have been working on the encapsulation issue, many of whom have poured resources into this area for several years. In fact, encapsulation is the key enabling technology for the larger-format/longer lifetime OLEDs that will be entering the market in the near- to mid-term, and thus can unlock entire market segments.

Small, rigid OLED displays are now widely commercially available and expected to continue to expand, principally in smartphone and other mobile computing displays and the OLED TV market is finally poised to take off within the next few years, as display manufacturers launch newer, bigger models with better value propositions for customers.

The emergence of the OLED lighting industry will be the defining opportunity for OLED materials suppliers turning a niche market into a significant opportunity after 2015.
Glass encapsulation technologies heavily dominate the market today, and glass will continue to dominate in the near- to mid-term.

However, the consensus is that glass will not be sufficient for the types of OLEDs expected to emerge over the next decade. OLED panels are getting larger, and the emerging lighting and TV markets expect OLED panels to last much longer than the mobile phone and mp3 sub-displays of the past. Furthermore, the cost pressures are getting more serious. The days in which manufacturers were willing to pay high premiums for good encapsulation strategies are long gone, and low-cost options for encapsulation are now demanded.