Major advancements in the last five years have led to the double-digit growth rate of the e-textile market with a number of about 100 million USD in yearly wholesale revenue. Both the electronic and apparel giants are assessing the sector and are building strategies while the analysts are predicting growth in the coming years.
According to a report published by Research and Markets, a prominent investment has been made that had enabled the mainstream commercial products and lead to the market approaching 5billlion USD by the end of 2027. Though been more than 90% of our lives we are in contact with textile but now it has started to become intelligent and this new functionality is based on the integration of textile and electronics.
In their purest form according to the definition, e-textiles based on the integration of inherently electrically or electronically active fibers have begun to see integration into early products. However, with many associated challenges around reliability, performance, and comfort, there has been a strong push towards other solutions that can achieve better properties including washability, stretch ability, and new functionalities.
The reports have covered an entire e-textiles value chain, including materials like metals, polymers, fibers, yarns, textiles products like knitted, woven, embroidered, non-woven and emerging materials and components like sensors, connectors and the interface to traditional electronics, etc. that are used to this date. At the same time, it is presenting a roadmap for the future specifying more than 30 different academic and initial prototype products in areas like new conductive fibers, stretchable electronics, energy harvesting, energy storage, logic, and memory.
The published report also describes the full value chain, looking at the material and component options, to the manufacturing challenges, through to the applications, markets, and key end users. Trends by market sector are crucial, as the addressable markets are both large and diverse. The report characterizes key market sectors including Sports & Fitness, Medical & Healthcare, Wellness, Home & Lifestyle, Industrial, commercial, military, Fashion, including automotive etc.
