The market for metal mesh transparent conductors will surge from $55 million in 2015 to $280 million in 2018, continuing to $1 billion by 2022, thanks the continued proliferation of touchscreen technologies but also a number of smaller markets that emphasize large-size panels where meshes’ advantages can be exploited, according to a new report from industry analyst firm NanoMarkets.
Details of the new report, “Market Opportunities for Metal Meshes as Transparent Conductors, 2015-2022” including a downloadable excerpt, are available at:
About the Report:
Metal mesh transparent conductors have come into their own in the past year, clearly emerging as a serious alternative to widely used indium tin oxide (ITO) due to advantages in conductivity, flexibility, configuration, and reduced costs. Principally this technology has emerged in the touch screen sensor space, but meshes’ superior ability to effectively spread voltage across a large panel is drawing attention to other applications: from longtime use in thin-film solar PV and digital signage, to more recent forays into OLED lighting, antennas, EMI/RFI, and transparent heating elements.
At the same time, metal mesh TCs still have to overcome some disadvantages, from visibility of grid lines to the problem of “moiré” pattern effects, although newer iterations of metal mesh TCs seem to be solving these issues. Metal meshes also require significant and costly customization for displays. Efforts to replace silver with copper in metal meshes have proved quite challenging. These factors, plus some recent news and rumors of setbacks in this sector — Atmel shuttering its XSense business, UniPixel’s continued delays, reports of slow business at O-Film and Fujifilm — suggest metal meshes might not penetrate the TC market as fast as once hoped.
In this report, NanoMarkets analyzes the latest developments in metal mesh TC technology and what we see as the market opportunities, and thus revenue potential, across several key end application sectors. We also compare and contrast metal meshes against the other alternative TC technologies (silver nanowires, carbon nanotubes, conductive polymers, other metal oxides) as well as the incumbent and dominant ITO, to gauge how such market opportunities might be apportioned. The analysis in this report is based on NanoMarkets’ extensive program covering the transparent conductor sector for the past decade.
Companies and products supplying the major market segments that are discussed in this report include: 3M, Atmel, Dai Nippon Printing, Epigem, Fujifilm, Hitachi Chemical, JTouch, Konica Minolta, O-Film/Suzhou NanoGrid, PolyIC, Rolith, Toppan Touch, UniPixel, Visual Planet, Young Fast, and Zytronic.
