Indium Tin Oxide
A transparent, electrically conductive material made primarily from indium oxide, used as the standard electrode layer in touch screens, flat-panel displays and solar cells.
Covered in 1 MetalsCost.com News Intelligence article, most recently on August 19, 2026.
Overview
Indium tin oxide, usually shortened to ITO, is a ceramic material — mostly indium oxide with a small amount of tin oxide mixed in — that manages a combination almost no other material offers cheaply: it's both transparent and electrically conductive. That combination is what makes touchscreens, flat-panel displays and thin-film solar cells work at all, since each of those needs a see-through layer that can also carry an electrical signal or current. ITO is applied as an extremely thin coating, usually deposited as a film only a few hundred nanometres thick, onto glass or flexible plastic, and it has remained the dominant material for this job for decades despite indium's cost and limited supply, because no cheaper transparent conductor has matched its performance at commercial scale.
How It's Manufactured
ITO coatings are almost always applied by sputtering: a solid ITO target, made by mixing and hot-pressing or sintering indium oxide and tin oxide powders into a dense ceramic disc or plate, is placed in a vacuum chamber and bombarded with ions that knock loose atoms off its surface, which then deposit as an even film onto glass or plastic substrates passing beneath it. The thickness and exact deposition conditions are tightly controlled, since even small variations change the film's transparency and conductivity. An older, less common route uses chemical vapour deposition or spray pyrolysis instead, but sputtering dominates commercial production because it gives more uniform, higher-quality films at the scale touchscreen and display manufacturing requires.
Byproducts
Sputtering is a genuinely inefficient way to use material: a sputtering target typically only deposits a fraction of its mass as usable film — utilisation rates well under half are common — with the rest eroding unevenly off the target and redepositing on chamber walls, shielding and fixtures rather than the substrate. Because indium is expensive and supply-constrained, manufacturers don't treat that lost material as waste; specialised recyclers strip the redeposited ITO off chamber hardware and reprocess it, along with worn-out spent targets, back into indium oxide and tin oxide feedstock for new targets, making ITO recycling a meaningful and economically necessary part of the display-manufacturing supply chain rather than an afterthought.
Who Consumes It
Display and touchscreen manufacturers are by far the largest buyers of ITO-coated glass and film, led by major panel makers in South Korea, China, Japan and Taiwan supplying smartphone, tablet, laptop and television screens to global electronics brands. Solar-panel manufacturers are the other major consumer, using ITO as the transparent front electrode in thin-film photovoltaic cells. A smaller volume goes to makers of architectural low-emissivity glass, anti-static coatings, and specialised electronics like touch-enabled instrument displays, aircraft and automotive de-icing glass, and organic LED lighting panels.
Everyday Uses
Almost anyone who has used a smartphone, tablet, ATM, self-checkout kiosk or laptop touchpad has touched a layer of ITO without knowing it, since it's the transparent conductive layer beneath the glass that senses a fingertip. It also shows up less obviously in energy-efficient windows, where a thin ITO or similar coating reflects heat while staying clear, and in heated windshield and aircraft-window de-icing systems, where the coating itself conducts current to warm the glass. Because it's built into so many everyday screens, ITO is one of the more consequential materials most consumers have never heard of, despite interacting with it dozens of times a day.
Industrial Uses
Beyond consumer electronics, ITO is a core material in thin-film solar photovoltaic manufacturing, where it serves as the transparent electrode that lets sunlight reach the active cell layer while still carrying generated current away. Aerospace and defence applications use ITO-coated glass and canopies for electromagnetic shielding and anti-icing, and it's a standard component in flexible and OLED display manufacturing, where thin-film transistor backplanes need a transparent conductive layer compatible with bendable substrates. As touchscreen and display manufacturing has grown into a very large global industry, ITO demand has grown with it, which is part of why indium supply constraints have become a genuine bottleneck for electronics manufacturers in recent price cycles.
