A growing demand for Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC) products from wearables, intelligent cars and drones, will push the FPC market to hit $16.642 billion in 2025, with a CAGR of 5.5% between 2018 and 2025, according to Global and China Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC) Industry Report, 2019-2025. FPC products are used in smartphones and tablet PC for display, touch control, fingerprint recognition, etc.

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In 2018, smartphone, tablet PC and ordinary computers accounted for around 39.8%, 15.8% and 9.1% of FPC market, separately, while communications and automotive electronics took a combined 14.6% or so. New energy vehicles will be a new hotspot on FPC industry chain, and the demand from emerging markets like automotive electronics will be conducive to the growth of the FPC industry. It is predicted that automobile will command 17.8% of FPC market in 2025, says a press release.

China still leads the world in FPC output value in spite of small scale of its FPC vendors.

By and large, Nippon Mektron as the largest flexible board vendor in the world performed poorly in 2016 due to the downturn in smartphone market before vigorously developing technologies and flexible substrates for manufacturing automotive FPC in 2017.

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Inter Flex that supplies the most FPCs for iPhone, produced flexible copper clad laminates (FCCL) using the technology of Cu sputtering deposition on PI films, and FPCs with I-Soft substrates manufactured by semi-additive process (SAP) over the past few years.

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