E-paper display industry maturing, but opportunities still abound

GLEN ALLEN, USA: The e-paper display business has survived a tough year and has emerged as a mainstream display technology with strong prospects going forward says a new report from NanoMarkets LC, a Virginia-based industry analyst firm which has been covering the e-paper space for more than four years. The report goes on to project that by 2015, revenues for e-paper space will reach $2.6 billion in revenues.

Key points from the report:
NanoMarkets expects considerable success for e-paper in the future, based on the fact that it has features that no other display technology can match. Its low power and ability to be read in sunlight has already enabled a whole new class of products – e-book readers – to be created.

By 2015, book readers are expected to account for over $500 million in e-paper revenues, according to NanoMarkets forecasts contained in the report. These factors combined with the ease with which e-paper can handle dot matrix, two-color (or grayscale) graphics is making highly competitive with conventional LCD technology for simple signage and packaging applications.

The focus of the e-paper industry has shifted to Asia where it has attracted significant investment from the world’s largest display makers such as LG and AUO. E Ink, whose brand has defined the e-paper space for many years, has become part of the Taiwanese company, Prime View International. Almost half of the 23 e-paper firms profiled in the new NanoMarkets study are owned by Asian interests.

Also validating the potential of e-paper is the growing interest of high-volume chip firms such as Texas Instruments, Marvell and Freescale that believe that the rapid growth of e-paper will create new markets for specialized power management ICs, applications processors and, of course, driver chips. In some cases, e-paper support is being added to systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) to reduce the cost and increase the speed-to-market for e-readers.

Despite the growing maturity of the e-paper market, NanoMarkets believes that there are still many open opportunities and notes that innovative new firms and technologies continue to enter the e-paper space promising lower costs, lower power consumption or novel functionality such as inherent touch-screen capabilities.

The report also says that while the quality of multi-color e-paper is now as good as color newspaper pictures, e-paper’s true potential is still constrained by the absence of a high-quality multi-color technology. NanoMarkets believes that whoever wins the race to achieve high-quality e-paper could eventually own a large segment of the e-paper market.