The price of Silver is going in one direction, up. Global forces are driving this increase, and those forces are only getting stronger. Since the start of 2024, the price of silver has increased 30%, buoyed by both supply and demand issues. Forecasting metals is notoriously tricky, putting the electronics industry in an ever more precarious position. Predictions for $50/oz in 2025 and $100 in 2030 are becoming common.
Investors consider silver to be a volatile investment. And while it does swing a bit, it’s most dramatic changes are driven by longer term macro events. Silver started 2024 at + $22/oz, a level it has maintained for the past 4 years. Prior to that, silver had bounced around + $16 for nearly 7 years. Forecasters are targeting + $35/oz by end of 2024.(1) (2)
This means trouble for the printed electronics market. Currently, more that 80% of applications use silver as their primary ink material. And more than 95% of photovoltaic cells (Solar panels) use as much as 20 grams of silver per panel. With industrial demand for silver increasing across many sectors, there will be increasing pressure on replacing silver-based inks, especially in high volume or large quantity applications.
The overwhelming majority of today’s applications utilize micro-sized silver flakes to prepare conductive inks. Much of this is due to silver’s highly conductive nature coupled with its natural anti-oxidative makeup. Advancements in smaller scale technologies are opening the door to new ways of using other materials to offer comparable performance and to limit detrimental material reactions such as oxidation. Technologies including nanoparticle (NP) and molecular (MOD) formulations offer comparable performance and material reaction, but are copper-based. Copper, second only to silver in conductivity, replaces silver in NP formulations, along with additional materials that promote various performance characteristics at the nanoscale level.
By adopting technological developments in nano and molecular products, a breadth of applications and a host of new uses and products can be brought to market. These nano-sized formulations can also directly replace silver in existing micro-based uses, which for a large number of current products is a solution to a brewing problem that could price them out of the market.
Comments