ABSTRACT
Water technology is a difcult market for cutting-edge technologies. Water analytics, as an example, is a brutally competitive $1.5 billion business, relatively small as major markets go, and by most measures it is a very mature and consolidated market. Water membranes, surprisingly, represent a similar $1.5-1.6 billion market, once you strip away the integrated systems and treatments and focus on the membranes themselves where nanotechnologies might play. It too is highly consolidated among major players such as GE, Dow, and Hyux. Nonmembrane treatment markets such as absorbent media are larger but dominated by lowcost materials. Next-generation technologies moving into any of these markets face a gauntlet of commodity incumbents and customers as reliably conservative as Queen Victoria.
