The last year saw an enormous market increase in thermal imaging product sales, including China. Although market evolution is difficult to predict based on a singular blip effect, if the current situation extends, there will be a moderate to strong increase of the thermal imaging market, based in part on new market applications, concludes a new market report by Dr Schmitt Consult, licensed to members of the European Photonics Industry Consortium, EPIC.

One of the symptoms of Covid-19 is an increase in human body temperature, i.e., fever. As thermal imaging cameras can measure body temperature without the need for contact, they are now commonly used at airports and cultural events as a first line of detection of individuals who may be infected.

So the major customers were retail shops, banks, museums, event organizers, companies, government organizations and travel infrastructures, e.g. airports, train and bus stations.

Procurement was not very coordinated. Although standards existed, purchasing agents leaned toward the purchase of less expensive cameras, without realizing many were non-compliant. Also, many systems were developed within a short period of time and were derived from products used in other domains. A short delivery time of a less expensive, fully functional system was the preference.

Regional differences

During this period, there was a dramatic increase in the number of thermography units sold with the market (per unit) of 426 % from 2019 to 2020. However, the Chinese market share increase from 15 % to 63 % was at the expense of US, European, and Korean market shares.

The main reason for this disparity is that for some years, Chinese companies have been able to produce their own small pixel bolometers, independent from US and EU imports. The Chinese increase in market share was in spite of the fact that the largest Chinese manufacturers had been banned from a large part of the US market following the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The future for Europe

Despite a losing market share in 2020, due to the size of the global increase, Europe actually increased the number of thermography units sold by 34 % compared with 2019. As Jose Pozo, EPIC CTO points out, “In the last few years we have seen a major growth by EPIC members developing IR cooled and uncooled detectors, and Covid-19 has shown the importance of this technology. We believe that Europe has some of the best technologies in SWIR and MWIR, and new applications are going to enable even further growth.”

EPIC reports provide information that can be used for corporate strategy, new product development, research, technology development, or marketing. They are freely available to the association’s members and their employees through EPIC’s extranet.