The OLED market has suffered a significant slowdown and companies are being more circumspect about the potential for the technology according to a recent report by market analysts Nanomarkets.
Nanomarkets, which has published over one hundred reports on the emerging technology, suggests that the OLED market needs to be rethought in the light of an economic future with slower growth.
Currently, the report suggests the OLED market struggles on account of several separate factors. It highlights the fact that because OLEDs are classed within the luxury market the prospect of increased interest and development could be a called into question in times of reduced wealth and higher unemployment. The report also argues that potentially lucrative office lighting market is still looking very elusive.
The fact that little news has emerged from the sector in the last year is also taken as an indication that necessary improvements in size and performance have not been achieved.
OLED expert Dr Geoff Williams of Thorn told Lighting that he concurred with the headline findings of the study, explaining, “For quite a while the expectations of marketing firms have been far too exaggerated.
“There’s been a significant exaggeration of the size and the growth of the market for OLED market, and the speed of the growth. The slow-down of new build and retrofit was always going to have a mitigating effect on the exploitation speed of OLED technology.”
“The technology for some significant length of time has been hyped in the capability of energy efficiency and it’s been sold upon energy efficiency but it’s still significantly short of T5 florescent in terms of performance and in terms of price,” he said.
The incandescent phase out may also apparently speed up the OLED market, but could also cause the market to saturate more quickly. Policy does appear to be one way of pushing the technology forward, according to Williams, “I think the technology will come through but we need to have different strategies. If you look at the strategies coming out of the EU regarding smart environments and integration of technologies that’s where we’ve got to look at exploiting solid state lighting.”
“That very high tier market share is very much controlled by the lighting designers and architects specifying the technology and they are not going to overlook trusted technologies for one that has no field data on lifetime or capability data associated with it.” said Williams.
The report suggests that companies such as GE, Philips, Osram and a number of emerging Asian companies will be instrumental in market evolution but the OLED industry still requires a strong advocate with the resources to push the technology into the market.
