there are new kinds of batteries and supercapacitors on the market that also need higher performance electrodes. These demands for better electrodes translate into new opportunities for
conductive coatings.
Meanwhile, the display industry—the biggest consumer of
conductive coatings—is facing the fact that the boom days for
liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are over. On one hand, this leads
manufacturers to squeeze the biggest possible margins out of the
remaining (and still gigantic) demand for LCDs. On the other
hand, it encourages them to look for entirely new business opportunities outside of the mainstream LCD industry, such as in
e-paper, OLED displays, transparent displays and flexible displays. All of these new types of displays have either already appeared on the market or will appear in the next year-and-a-half.
While the developments in the display and solar panel indus-
tries are relatively new, it is also important to recognize that
trends in the electronics and communications industries continue
to promote growth in the rest of conductive coatings market,
thus counteracting the core maturity of much of the conductive
coatings space:
• The expansion of electronics, especially of electronics that
support pervasive wireless computing, is fueling growth in
the market for EMI/RFI shielding coatings. Legacy prod-
ucts will continue to do well, but new solutions for shield-
ing are also expected to grow.
• Electrostatic dissipation (ESD) and antistatic coatings markets are also benefitting from the trend toward pervasive
electronics, and are further fueled by the onward march of
Moore’s Law, which makes errant charges ever more harmful in electronics manufacturing and assembly.
Conductive Coatings and the Shrinking
Photovoltaics Market
The PV market has for the past several years been a gift to the
materials industry. Partly thanks to government subsidies, the
solar industry has grown dramatically, including significant
growth spurts in 2010 and 2011. In particular, the PV industry
has bought at least $3 billion in products from the conductive
coatings industry in recent years. The chart at the top of this page
contains a forecast for the PV conductive coatings market.
It now appears, however, that the boom days are over for the
PV sector, at least as far as the highest-priced conductive coatings
products are concerned, and there are significant challenges to
the status quo in the types of conductive coatings used in the PV
market. First, the high price of silver is forcing it out of PV backside electrode and reflector applications wherever possible. There
is also the ongoing shift in market share toward more thin-film
PV that is changing the accepted landscape, as the kinds of conductive coatings used in the market dominant crystalline silicon
PV sector are quite different, and generally less expensive, from
those used in the various thin-film PV technologies.
In addition, in most countries, many of the subsidies that have
supported the PV industry for a number of years are being significantly reduced. Germany, currently one of the largest PV markets, recently announced sharp cuts in feed-in-tariffs (FITs) that
support its PV industry. The ramifications of these cuts are not
yet fully known, but when the Spanish government took this step
a few years ago, the PV market in Spain declined by 75 percent.
The impact of these trends on sales of conductive coatings to
the PV industry will be large. Specifically, $70 million in revenue
will be knocked off the value of conductive coating sales over
just the next couple of years, rising to about $335 million by the
end of the decade. This reduction means that conductive coating
firms can no longer count on the PV sector to provide new business revenues simply based on organic growth.
The bright spot for conductive coatings suppliers is that the
shift in market share toward more thin-film PV will create new
opportunities, because the electrode materials used in thin-film
PV are not a settled matter. Therefore, a new supplier entering
this space is not battling an entrenched material and probably
not an entrenched supplier either. This opportunity can only get
better over time, since with subsidies removed, firms are more
likely to come up with innovative new types of solar panels with
even more uncertain electrode requirements.
Thus, there are near-term opportunities to offer lower-cost
carbon pastes, molybdenum coatings, aluminum, and silver-alu-minum products, instead of conventional (and high-priced) silver
materials. In addition, alternative transparent conductors—be-
