Film industry important development direction: high value-added film

High added value is the key to improve product competitiveness. For polymer films, the development of new products with high added value, that is, functional films, is the primary problem facing the industry at present, and it is also the future development direction of China's film industry. Functional films have obvious cross-disciplinary characteristics, involving polymer, precision machinery, computer-aided analysis, optical design, etc., and play an important role in China's strategic emerging industries.

Film materials can be seen everywhere in our daily life, such as the protective film affixed to the surface of the screen of various electronic products, cling film, plastic mulch, window film and so on. The various membranes common in our lives have very low technical content, fierce competition in the industry, and many overcapacity. However, there are many high-performance functional films in life that are not easy to notice, but they are highly technical, have a huge market space, and China relies heavily on imported subsectors.

Today, let's take a look at four of these functional membranes:

1, special optical polyester film

At present, the special optical polyester film should be the most widely used in all functional films, the market space is large, and the A-share related listed companies are the most segmented functional film industry.

Special optical polyester film is a layer or multilayer film plated on the surface of optical parts in order to change the optical characteristics of the surface of optical parts. Optical film according to its use classification, characteristics and applications can be divided into: reflective film, anti-reflection film/anti-reflection film, filter, polarizing film/polarizing film, compensation film/phase difference plate, matching film, diffusion film/film, brightening film/prism film/condenser film, shading film/black and white glue. The related derived types are optical-grade protective film, window film, etc. These special optical films are usually the optical base film after processing and composite production. The optical base film is produced by PET through drying, casting, coating, bidirectional drawing and other processes. The reason why polyester material is used is mainly because its structure is stable and not easy to deform, and its optical properties are excellent, which is suitable for matching various coatings.

One of the most used places for optical films is the display panel of various electronic products. From top to bottom, it is the structure of the liquid crystal display from outside to inside, we can see that the light module and the liquid crystal panel are respectively applied to reflect film, diffusion film, brightening film, polarizing film and so on. Usually, the cost of LCD panels accounts for about one-third of the total cost of LCD TV manufacturing, and the cost of optical films accounts for about 20% of the cost of LCD panels. In the future, with the application of Internet of Things technology, various display screens will be more common, so the demand for optical films will be very large.

China has become one of the world's largest producers of flat panel display equipment, at the same time, the domestic touch screen industry explosive growth, prompting the rapid increase in demand for optical film, optical film has become one of the most important strategic raw materials in the front end of the photoelectric industry chain.

2, flexible PI film

The full name of PI film is polyimide film (PolyimideFilm), which is the world's leading film insulation material, by the polycondensation of phthalic acid dianhydride (PMDA) and diamine diphenyl ether (DDE) in a strong polar solvent and then the film is formed by imide.

Flexible PI film is one of the organic polymer materials with high temperature resistance of more than 400 degrees Celsius, long-term use temperature between 200 and 300 degrees Celsius, no obvious melting point, with high insulation performance, good performance in diaphragm materials. It has excellent high and low temperature resistance, electrical insulation, adhesion, radiation resistance and other special properties, so it can replace the traditional ITO glass, widely used in the foldable mobile phone substrate, cover plate and touch material. Among them, yellow PI is mainly used in flexible OLED substrate materials and auxiliary materials, and CPI(transparent PI) is mainly used in cover plate materials and touch materials.

3, high barrier film

High barrier film is a multilayer structure film made by extruding a material with strong gas barrier property and a polyolefin with strong thermal and water barrier property at the same time. The high barrier film can block the infiltration of oxygen and water vapor, avoid the reproduction of the contents of microorganisms, prevent its oxidation and mildew, and improve the storage. High barrier film is mainly used in the field of food and drug packaging, high performance high barrier film can also be used in electronic devices, photovoltaic cells and OLED packaging.

The manufacturing process of high barrier film mainly includes multilayer composite, surface coating, surface modification, bidirectional stretching, etc. High barrier films usually have excellent barrier properties, mechanical properties, transparency and printing adaptability. With the continuous development and growth of the downstream industry, the demand for high barrier film in China's market continues to grow.

In the future era of the Internet of things, sensors will be everywhere, water vapor barrier film will lead the sensor to flexibility, lightweight and wearable, flexible printed electronics based flexible sensing applications have broad prospects, including infrared sensing, robot sensing, smart wearable sensing, biomedical sensing, printed electronics once the explosion, the demand for water vapor barrier film is also very huge.

From 2014 to 2019, the average annual compound growth rate of China's high barrier film market was 15.1%; In 2019, the market size of China's high barrier film was 10.27 billion yuan, an increase of 10.3%. It is expected that by 2024, the high barrier film market will exceed 15 billion.

In the total supply of China's high barrier film market, the total domestic production accounted for about 55%, the total import accounted for about 45%, the degree of external dependence is large, and domestic products are mainly concentrated in the low-end field, imported products are mainly high-end products.

4, allotropic conductive film (ACF)

Anisotropic conductive film is a coating between substrate a and substrate b, limiting the current can only flow from the vertical axis z direction to the substrate A, b between a special coating material, both one-way conduction and bonding fixed function, can solve some of the past connector can not deal with the fine wire connection problem.

Nowadays, electronic products are developing in the direction of portable and miniaturization, which puts higher requirements on circuit assembly technology, and traditional tin welding packaging materials and technology can not meet the development needs of the industry. The appearance of heteromeric conductive film completely breaks the limitations of traditional packaging materials and processes, and fully meets the packaging requirements of modern large-scale integrated circuit microelectronics.

ACF is a new type of technical functional materials, the current global ACF production capacity is mainly concentrated in Japan, South Korea and the United States and other enterprises, more than 80% of the current market is occupied by Japanese enterprises. The technical threshold of ACF is high, and developed countries have been strictly blocking relevant technologies, resulting in a long-term heavy dependence on imports in ACF. In recent years, the Chinese government attaches importance to the development of high-performance new materials, with the support of policies, China's ACF production capacity continues to grow, but panel manufacturers in order to ensure product quality, select raw material suppliers have a more strict certification system and time cycle, resulting in ACF localization process is relatively slow, seriously affecting and restricting the development of the domestic ACF industry.

At present, the main ACF manufacturers in the world are Diruhe, Hitachi Chemical, 3M Company, Guodu Chemical, Guanpi materials, Weifeng Technology, Shenzhen Fei Shier, etc. At present, some products of domestic ACF isotropic conductive film are still mainly imported, and in the future, China's ACF isotropic conductive film will gradually realize domestic replacement.

High functional membrane material industry is a very potential industry.