Sapphire Applications and Market: From LED to Consumer Electronics

The sapphire industry recently ended an 18 month period of depressed pricing and achieved US$936 million in revenue for wafer products. Recovery was helped by an increase in LED demand due to growing adoption in general lighting and a resilient LCD backlight market. But the saving grace was new consumer electronic (CE) applications: camera lens and fingerprint reader covers, mostly driven by Apple in 2013. Overall, the growth in wafer demand will be enough to justify a capacity increase toward the end of 2014. For the longer term, we analyzed opportunities of alternative LED substrates (GaN and Si) but concluded that sapphire will retain > 90% of the market through 2020. For more information visit : http://www.electronics.ca/store/sapphire-applications-and-markets.html