Flexible Display Market to Expand by Factor of 35 from 2007 to 2013

Flexible displays are playing an increasingly important role in the global high-tech industry, serving as the crucial enabling technology for a new generation of portable devices that are designed to combine mobility with compelling user interfaces.

Due to the arrival of Polymer Vision’s Readius pocket-sized e-reader and other such products, iSuppli Corp forecasts the total flexible display market will reach $2.8 billion by 2013, a 35-times expansion from about $80 million in 2007. Rising shipments of flexible displays are being enabled by the establishment of several batch and roll-to-roll manufacturing facilities.

“Flexible displays are intuitively appealing to end users and product designers because of their ruggedness, thinness, light weight and novelty,” said Jennifer Colegrove, PhD, Senior Analyst for Emerging Displays at iSuppli. “Such displays also offer manufacturers the potential for inexpensive fabrication because they can be made using new printing methods or roll-to-roll processing. Furthermore, flexible displays have the advantage of easy and relatively inexpensive shipping and safety handling compared to conventional rigid screens. When flexible displays break, they don’t have any sharp edges that can cause injuries or further damage.”

Flex your power
Flexible displays are being used for a multitude of products, including e-readers/e-paper, electronic display cards, electronic shelf labels, automotive applications, clothing/wearable displays, removable storage devices and point-of-purchase/public signage and advertisements.

Flexible displays already entered consumers’ daily lives long before the Readius, with products like Motorola Inc’s display for its Motofone handset, electronic card displays and t-shirt displays. However, all the flexible displays in the market before 2008 were direct-drive or passive-matrix types. Before this year, there were no Active Matrix (AM) flexible displays that could provide the kind of image quality that users expect from their LCD-TVs and PC monitors. Because of this, 2008 represents “Year One” for the AM flexible display market.

There now are more than a dozen display technologies can be made into flexible screens, including traditional LCD, bi-stable LCD, OLED, electrophoretic, electrochromic and Electroluminescent (EL).

www.isuppli.com