In 2025, more than US$25 billion will be spent on intermediate materials and formulations for the wearable technology materials market. The major long term reason for this is the expected use of e-fibers to create e-textiles in the future. In the short term, the market is set to benefit vastly from manufacturers that focus on making their devices more and more innovative. There is a growing need for current wearable technology to be more flexible, more comfortable, and smaller.
Another growing latent demand of the consumers is for wearable technology and its materials to be either transparent or hidden by incorporating them into or underneath clothing.
Other facets of innovation desired from wearable technology materials are to make them disposable, implantable, and either easy to charge or containing vast pools of electricity. This stems from one of the more common market restraints faced by the wearable technology materials market – energy drain.
Wearable technologies that drain of electricity in a few hours and require frequent charging are not deemed feasible by consumers. This could even prove to be life-threatening in the healthcare industry, where the list of wearable technology includes exoskeletons, contact lenses and wristbands that indicate glucose levels, and medical e-patches.
The current leaders in the wearable technology materials market include Sumitomo Chemical and CDT, T-Ink, Soligie, Sekisui Chemical Co. Ltd., Samsung, Paper Battery, GSI, Grafen Chemical Industries, Fujikura Kasei Co. Ltd., Bando Chemical Industries, and Adidas/Textronics. Most of them are creating primary and intermediate materials that can help them capture major shares in it. The market also presents a large amount of niche opportunities that new entrants can harvest and become specialists in at the later stages. Market players also need to address the restraint of needing faster and cheaper 3D printing technologies. Solutions to this challenge could open up new opportunities for premium pricing.
