IDTechEx posted a very interesting analysis of the OLED lighting market, in which they see the OLED market growing very slowly - it will remain smaller than $80 million until 2017. The market will start picking up to reach $840 million in 2022 - still a very small slice of the global lighting market.
IDTechEx says that OLED technology is very slow to close up to performance and cost gap to LED based lighting. In addition, following the recent Philips OLED BU sale to OLEDworks (and Panasonic decision to dissolve its OLED lighting activity back in March 2014), the only two major companies left in the OLED market is LG Chem and Konica Minolta.
An interesting observation by IDTechEx is that both KM and LG Chem are not involved with any other lighting technologies - so they are pursuing OLED lighting full heatedly, unlike Philips, Osram for example who fear that OLED will cannibalize their LED sales.
IDTechEx is much more pessimistic on the market compared to UBI, who only yesterday released their own forecasts - saying that the market will reach over $2.7 billion in 2020 as OLED will almost close the price gap to LED by then.
It's quite difficult to forecast this market. On one hand, OLEDs are still very expensive indeed compared to LED and CFL devices, and it seems that very few companies can actually invest the funds needed to mass produce OLED panels. But there are some bright spots too - OLED prices are getting lower, OLED luminaries are getting into retail channels, and both LG Chem and Konica Minolta are indeed quite committed.
I also think that there's more to the OLEDWorks acquisition than we know at this stage, and we may be positively surprised at OLEDWorks in the future. Of course there are many other OLED lighting makers (such as Kaneka, Osram, Mitsubishi-Pioneer) - which seem to be on the sidelines at the moment.
Comments
Riccardo,
There are several more OLED lighting makers indeed - but it seems these companies are still on the sidelines aren't fully committed to mass production of OLED lighting panels yet. You can add Ason, Blackbody, Lumiotec, First-o-light, Showa-Denko and Toshiba to your list...
Riccardo, thanks for your comments. I am Khasha, the lead researcher at IDTechEx on OLED lighting. As Ron mentioned, several other firms continue with their small programmes on OLED lighting, but the two last major players at the panel level are LG Chem and Konica Minolta.
Here's a funny story... I contacted LG because I was curious about how much the panels would cost per individual unit and whether 2 or 3 of them would be affordable for me.
They directed me towards a local reseller... who never got back to me.
Well - if that's how companies take care of potential customers, it's no surprise to me if they're not able to sell shit.
If you want, I can get you in touch with an LG Chem distributor - contact us here.
would be nice also to remind IDTechEx about the presence of Mitsubishi Chemical and Pioneer, Kaneka and OSRAM (just to cite a few) which are keeping investing in this technology and bringing nice technology improvements like wet-coating deposition and color tunability. Isn't some bias in the IDtechEx considerations?