It’s fascinating to go back a few short years and take a look at the early predictions made about the impact of nanotechnologies.

Coming off the high of the dot-com boom, most commentators were predicting major impacts in technology, with nanotechnologies being seen through the same high-tech lens as the Internet revolution.

Many pundits were predicting huge breakthroughs in data storage, with IBM’s millipede being hailed as the future of data storage technology and carbon nanotube-based random access memories enabling “instant on” computing by 2005.

Well, times have changed, and wiser heads have counseled that technology takes time. Indeed, there’s a lag of seven to 10 years between government science funding programs beginning and any resulting economic impact.

Nanotechnology is no different. IBM will consider serious offers for its famous millipede, and the carbon nanotube-based memory has been a year away from market for the past five years.

When we look at winners and losers from nanotechnologies, perhaps the picture isn’t so obvious. Few would have predicted that traditional industries, such as textiles, would be the first to feel the impact.

Many predicted the replacement of all manufacturing with molecular nanotechnologies within five years. However, for the past four years, whenever anyone has been asked to give an example of nanotechnologies in real life, stain-resistant pants have been constantly at the top of the list. Perhaps that gives us a clue where to look.

Companies such as Nano-Tex have been very successful with their stain-resistant pants (and other clothing). The entire textile industry has been one of the initial and major adopters of nanotechnology products and processes, with $13.6 billion worth of textiles using nanotechnologies predicted to be on the market by 2007.

At Cientifica, we predict in our recent report Nanotechnologies And The Textile Market that this figure will increase to some $115 billion by 2012. But before you start getting too excited, it’s worth taking a look behind the numbers.

The textile sector has radically changed in recent years through altered consumer needs, new technologies and globalization. It’s come a long way from simply spinning cotton or wool and is already an enthusiastic user of advanced technologies.

A trip around any shopping mall shows just how far textiles have come in the last 100 years, with the dazzling array of colors, feels and finishes, almost entirely due to adopting the products of the chemical industry.

In such an atmosphere of change and increasing competition, both manufacturers and retailers of textile products are continuously striving to meet the needs of their customers, being caught between the opposing forces of price and performance.

With the existing state of the textile industry, companies are trying to differentiate themselves from the commodity textiles markets and find and secure a niche through technological innovation. This relatively new strategy in textiles and clothing is driving a segmentation of the market based on nanotechnology.



Although the nanotechnology play is just one of the strategies that textile companies are using to survive, by finding a premium niche, textile companies–especially in Europe and the US–hope to be able to find an alternative to the unsustainable strategy of competing purely on cost with cheaper Asian textiles.

In this respect, the textile industry mirrors much of a traditional industry, which is having to make the shift from adding value through process innovation to creating value through product innovation, allowing the business models of nanotextile companies to be based more on intellectual property than on capital equipment.

This is reflected in the fact that almost 50 percent of the companies supplying the nanotechnologies for the textile industry are US based, while most of the manufacturers are in Asia.

Working with textile industry professionals around the world, we wanted to get behind the headline numbers and find out how much value nanotechnologies would add to the $4 trillion textile market and in what applications. In a broad sector, such as textiles, not all markets will be equally affected. In sectors such as clothing, where price is–and in most of the market always will be–the key driver, nanotechnologies won’t have a major impact.

Of course, there will be significant nanotech-related revenues, but it will be hard for nanotechnologies to penetrate much more than 1 percent of the apparel market, even when you include the various fibers, nanoparticles and dyestuffs that will be used. And most of this will be at the top end of the price spectrum.

Still, even 1 percent of a market predicted to hit $3 trillion by 2012 is a sizable business, which is why companies such as Big Dog BASF are very active in textiles.

The highest penetration of nanotechnologies and the highest growth rates will be in the non-cost-sensitive applications (e.g., medical, military and sports textiles), where performance is usually more important than cost. Once we started looking at penetration rates in the sports business, we saw some incredible growth potential.

It’s not surprising that after textiles, pundits often point to golf clubs and tennis rackets as key nanotechnology applications. The medical sector is also rapidly changing; although in this case, much of the innovation has been driven by the antibacterial properties of nano silver, a material that’s fast becoming one of the real nanotech success stories in marked contrast to carbon nanotubes.



Perhaps the most interesting and least predictable sector is in non-conventional technical textiles where nanotechnologies are enabling entirely new applications not normally associated with textiles. A wide variety of fibers are already used as fillers in materials from composites to paper, and new applications are emerging in areas from radiation shielding to building materials. Some of these will make use of synthetic fibers, but many will make use of modified natural fibers (e.g., cotton to coconut), providing opportunities for natural resource-rich developing countries.

While the penetration of nanotechnologies into the textile market may come as a surprise, it isn’t the only example of the rapid uptake of nanotechnologies by traditional industries. In an increasingly globalized world, where production can easily shift to the lowest-cost area, knowledge and innovation are becoming higher priorities for companies and governments alike. The textile industry may be the first adopter, but it certainly won’t be the last.