Silver lining for conductors

NanoMarkets sees revenues from the sale of silver-based transparent conductors reaching more than AU$513 million by 2016.

The report analyses the demand for the silver-based inks and films that are beginning to find their way into touch-screen displays and which, according to NanoMarkets, may also be used in conventional flat panel displays.

Other applications where the report predicts silver-based transparent conducting materials will be used include OLED and e-paper displays, OLED lighting, thin-film and organic photovoltaics, antistatics and EMI/RFI shielding.

The report provides eight-year projections (both volume and value) of all of these application areas. It also identifies what the implications are for other kinds of transparent conductor including carbon nanotubes, transparent conducting oxides and conductive polymers as well as the dominant ITO.

Among the firms discussed in this report are: 3M, Agfa, Cambrios, Carestream, Cima NanoTech, Dow Chemical, Fujifilm, Ferro, Kodak, PolyIC, Saint-Gobain, Sigma Technologies, Sumitomo, Suzhou NanoGrid and Toray.

The touch-screen displays business may be a good starting place for silver-based transparent conductor businesses, and this is the market that most of the firms selling ‘transparent silver’ are aiming for. But NanoMarkets believes that the longer-term revenue potential for touch screens will be limited. The new report indicates that touch-screen sensors will generate only AU$2.2 million in silver-based transparent conductor sales by 2016.

According to NanoMarkets, the only way for the materials discussed in this report to take off commercially in a big way will be if the firms that supply them overcome the resistance of the major FPD firms to making the switch from ITO.

It warns that if significant barriers to entry persist in the display industry, silver-based transparent conductors will never amount to more than a niche business.

However, if the conventional display industry does open up to silver-based transparent conductors, the market is likely to need these materials delivered in new forms.

In the same way that large display manufacturers now do their own ITO sputtering, display firms of the future will want to print their own transparent silver conductors.

This will mean that today’s tiny share of the silver transparent conductor market held by inks will increase rapidly at the expense of the films that currently dominate.

NanoMarkets also expects to see a growing market for silver-based transparent conductors on glass substrates.