Speaking at the ITRI Asia Tin Summit last week, Valentijn Van Velthoven of Alpha Assembly Solutions reviewed the key drivers of demand in the electronics assembly business and provided estimates of new tin demand being created in three key applications: power semiconductors, photovoltaic (PV) cells and LED lighting. He concluded that global tin use in these three areas could amount to some 10,000 tpy by 2020, compared to less than 2,000 tpy in the 2011 base year used in Alpha’s study.
The PV market was seen as the most important for increased tin use. While sales in 2017 may show little growth due to various negative factors in the EU, US and Japan, demand was expected to accelerate from 2018 as a function of a stronger China domestic market and a global improvement in the economics of solar energy relative to other sources. On top of this, tin use is likely to be stimulated by a move to lead-free solders, although this may be offset by a shift from the use of copper-solder ribbon connections to back contact cells.
The substitution of LED for incandescent lamps was seen as a major factor in improving global energy efficiency, and recent performance improvements also make LED lighting competitive with fluorescent lamps. Solders used in this application are already mainly high-tin content lead-free alloys. However despite the big gains in market share made by LED, the long lives of the new bulbs means than annual sales could peak in 2017/2018 and tin demand decline thereafter.
The power semiconductor market was seen as offering much smaller potential for tin use than the other two, with annual usage in hundreds rather than thousands of tonnes. While this is a $20 billion market forecast to grow at 8% per year, driven mainly by renewable energy and hybrid vehicles, the volumes of solder involved are very small, and alloys are mainly high-lead.
