Report finds that the OLED market will reach $1.9bn by 2025

Although OLED lighting provides companies with an opportunity to stand out in an increasingly cost-sensitive, commoditised and technologically-mature inorganic LED market, it is also a long-term risk. Once performance and cost parity is approached, OLED lighting can potentially cannibalise their growing markets around inorganic LEDs.

However, OLED technology is still comparatively young and the inorganic versions are ahead in terms of performance, production volume and cost reduction. This has opened a wide performance and cost gap between inorganic and organic versions, therefore before parity is approached, OLED lighting must carve out niche markets based on its unique offerings.

Although OLED technology offers surface emission, flexibility, thinness, warm colour distribution and cold emission, these do not make it unique. For example, due to waveguides, LEDs can attain effective surface emission. While OLED’s colour emission spectrum resembles natural light closely, by controlling the emission of individual green, blue and red emitters, LEDs are now also able to closely re-create a similar spectrum.

According to the report, the ability to create customised designs as much as possible at the manufacturing stage and before the luminaire design stage will be a competitive advantage. Therefore, as architectural, hospitality and shop segments prize design parameters the most, it is suggested that they will be the first to grow. Once cost decreases and lifetime is prolonged, residential, office, and outdoor segments will follow.

Through a ten-year market forecast segmented by lighting sector at the panel level, the report provides a detailed assessment of the market. Forecasts are expressed in value, area coverage and equivalent unit numbers, while cost projections are provided in $ per sqm and $ per klm split by the layer. Using critical assessments of the value proposition of OLED technology in each lighting sector, the report also provides market share forecasts in each segment. Here, parameters such as light quality, technology mix diversity, price sensitivity, light controllability, lifetime and light intensity are analysed. As well as this, latest industry updates and the profiles of players including Panasonic, LG Chem, Osram, Phillips Lighting and Sumitomo Chemical are provided.