Materials – Facts and Forecasts

Raw materials are about as exciting as yesterday's newspaper. As most investors know, the real economic action is in refining new and existing materials. Take the CD, for example. Its base material, a polycarbonate, is worth a mere one cent. But production is worth 100 times that, and the cost of the final product can easily exceed 15 €. The economic relaDevelopments, contacts, links, literaturetionship between raw materials and final products is even more dramatic when it comes to nanotechnology,

Experts agree that the targeted manipulation of materials on the atomic level will lead to the creation of scratch-free lacquers and glasses that repel water. It will revolutionize computer technology, lasers and displays, and open up new opportunities in medical technology (see article on nanotechnology). "Nanotechnology will become a normal part of nearly all industrial sectors," says Dr. Andreas Leson, a nanotech expert at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology in Dresden, Germany.

But how big is the current nano market and how much will it grow in the immediate future? According to Deutsche Bank, pure nanotech products such as nanopowders or nanostructured materials currently generate revenues of approximately US-$ 22 billion worldwide. The biggest benefactors of this business are chemical companies. However, because nanotechnology does not represent an independent industry, "it makes more sense to look at the final products that are impacted by it rather than at the nanoproducts themselves," says Dr. Matthias Werner, head of the Deutsche Bank Innovation Team.

Werner calculates that the world market for products that contain nanocomponents, such as computer hard disks and displays amounts to more than US-$ 116 billion. The German Association of Engineers, on the other hand, pegs the figure at only 50 billion €, with the market growing at an annual rate of 15 to 17 %. This figure includes products whose functionality is to a large extent determined by nanotechnology, such as read heads in computer hard disks, which alone account for revenues of some 34 billion €. The Sal. Oppenheim investment bank estimates that the revenue potential of nanotech products could be 200 billion € in 2005. And the U.S. National Science Foundation predicts that revenues from all products based on nanotechniques could reach US-$ 700 billion by 2008.

Anette Freise