Report projects US$6 billion OLED lighting market by 2015

According to a recent NanoMarkets report, OLED lighting will generate US$6 billion in revenues by 2015, driven by the need for cost-efficient lighting in a number of different applications, including general illumination, architectural lighting, backlighting, vehicular lighting and signage.

The report, entitled ‘OLED Lighting, An Eight-Year Market Forecast (2010)’, is part of the firm's recently launched ‘OLED Lighting Market Planning and Advisory Service’ that leverages years of analysis and forecasting of the OLED lighting market.

At present, most of the firms that are offering or planning to supply OLED lighting are focusing on the general illumination and/or the architectural lighting sectors, which, together, NanoMarkets believes, will account for just over $4 billion by 2015.

The report discusses the types of OLED lighting products that will be needed as effective substitutes for today’s incandescent and fluorescent bulbs and tubes and the price-points that these new OLED lighting products will fetch.

However, there are also other applications for OLED lighting with considerable potential. For example, vehicular lighting is expected to bring in over $750 million in revenue in 2015.

The report also includes two different scenarios for OLED backlighting - one in which OLEDs prove themselves to be an effective substitute to today’s electroluminescent lighting and one in which OLED technology reaches a level of development where it can provide an effective backlighting technology for LCDs. Under this second scenario, NanoMarkets believes that OLED backlighting could generate $1.4 billion in revenues.

The report analyses and quantifies the opportunities for the emerging OLED lighting space. It discusses what economic and technical challenges will need to be overcome in order to reach acceptable revenue levels as well as examines the alternative scenarios and the impact of panel size, efficiency, luminance and lifetimes. In addition to providing detailed forecasts, it considers the impact of performance improvements, funding and the establishment of the first OLED lighting manufacturing plants on the growth of OLED lighting revenues.