The Conductive Ink Market is Showing Growth

Conductive inks are a key market for flexible and printed electronics, as they essentially are responsible for the conductivity. It is a sizable market, with photovoltaics the largest end use. It is also a growing segment. Dr. Matthew Dyson, senior analyst for IDTechEx, places the conductive ink segment at more than $2 billion. “IDTechEx estimates the current conductive ink market size as $2.3 billion,” said Dr. Dyson. “Almost 80% is silver flake-based ink that is used to make the conductive fingers on silicon solar panels. While the market for this application established and may even decline in future as new technologies are adopted, there is extensive growth in flake-based inks for other applications, and also in emerging categories of conductive inks such as nanoparticle-based and particle-free inks.” Khasha Ghaffarzadeh of TechBlick noted that the conductive ink market is extremely diverse and is thus hard to characterize as a single uniform entity