By Charles Annis – Vice President, Manufacturing Research, DisplaySearch
In its July 21 press release, Corning also announced it is also expanding capacity for its protective Gorilla Glass. This new capacity will be ramped up from currently idle tanks in Shizuoka, Japan. How big and fast the market for cover glass will grow is more uncertain than the Chinese substrate opportunity, but it is potentially even more lucrative.
Gorilla Glass was only introduced into market for LCD applications in 2008 and already has been adopted by a large number of mobile phone, laptop, MP3 player, PDA and GPS devices to both increase durability—particularly in products that incorporate touch—and enhance product design. Corning is further targeting Gorilla Glass as a supersubstrate for touch sensors that can be laminated directly to LCD modules, reducing the thickness of the display package. And now, some set manufacturers are starting to integrate Gorilla Glass into TVs to enable new borderless designs. Corning lists the advantages of Gorilla Glass:
- Damage resistance for increased product life
- Thinner glass enables thinner and lighter end products
- Pristine surface of fusion glass means no polishing or lapping required to productize
- Environmentally friendly, no heavy metals and RoHS compliant
- Smudge resistant and easily cleaned coating
But Gorilla Glass is not the only solution for protective or borderless design solutions. Either PMMA (a plastic) or toughened soda lime glass may also be adopted.
Corning expects Gorilla Glass revenues to be over $200 million in 2010 and “estimates that sales could reach approximately $1 billion annually by 2011.” DisplaySearch calculates the $200 million sales forecast for 2010 is well within the cover glass available market. But the $1 billion opportunity for next year is a 5X increase requiring a huge jump in end-market acceptance, particularly for borderless TVs. The concern with borderless TVs is that any solution adds significant cost to the set above conventional designs.
For Gorilla Glass to succeed in the TV market, it must overcome two challenges. First, consumers must be willing to pay a premium for borderless designs in order to encourage set makers to develop new innovative models. Second, Gorilla Glass will need to use its performance advantages to become the approach of choice over the resin-based or soda lime cover glass competition.
If it can, the Gorilla Glass opportunity is potentially very large. But from DisplaySearch’s perspective, it is still a story that will require updating regularly to track just how widely cover glass will be adopted in the TV market.
