Silver’s Role in Global Connectivity Expected to Grow 10 Percent from 2020 to 2025

The use of silver in electronics and electrical applications (excluding photovoltaics) is forecast to rise from 224 million ounces (Moz) in 2020 to 246 Moz in 2025, reflecting a 10 percent increase, and underscoring silver’s role in emerging technologies, according to a recent report published by the Silver Institute.

“Today, silver is found in nearly all electronic devices,” the report noted. “With the greatest electrical conductivity of all metals, silver is playing a critical role in the latest technological advancements. Silver’s inherent conductivity is an important asset in the miniaturization of electronics; allowing electrical currents to flow in even the smallest semiconductors and computer chips.”

In the newest of the Silver Institute’s series of Market Trend Reports, titled Silver and Global Connectivity, produced by CRU International Limited, the London-based consultancy, the findings highlighted that:

• Silver is playing an important part in providing increased access to information, global markets, and communication, and, as a result, boosting productivity, reducing waste and inefficiencies, strengthening supply chains, allowing greater automation, and spurring economic activity. This is especially notable today as the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a dramatic uptick in the number of employees working from home and students learning remotely.

• Radio-frequency identification devices (RFID) wirelessly connect objects for tracking, monitoring, and data collection. The logistics and supply chain industry have had high adoption of RFID tracking systems to monitor their assets through air, rail, road, or ship. Health care has also benefited by allowing workers to discover real-time location of life-saving medicines and equipment. Projected usage of silver for RFID’s is expected to increase as much as 400 hundred percent through 2030.

• Silver is integral to applications such as the expansion of 5G communications technology and the joining of once ‘unintelligent’ goods to a greater ecosystem through the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), the network of historically noncommunicative physical objects that are now able to relay information. A common example is home thermostats and the ability to control them from a smartphone or other device.

• Silver offtake in electronics and electrical applications will benefit from the global green revolution’s need for additional power distribution to connect renewable power, off-grid energy storage, and increasingly, the installation of electric vehicle charging stations.

To download a copy of the report, please click here.

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