Sixteen years of organic and printed electronics — and counting
+Plastic Electronics was founded in 2008 as the first magazine dedicated to the business opportunities of organic, printed and flexible electronics. Relaunched in 2026 as an independent digital publication, we cover the industry with the same brief: technology, honestly assessed; markets, unsentimentally analysed.
Our history
The title began life under publisher Smithers Apex, covering the emergence of printed and organic electronics from its industrial heartlands — OLED lighting, printed transistor backplanes, conductive ink chemistry, roll-to-roll pilot lines and the annual pilgrimage of the LOPE-C era. The magazine built its reputation on explaining, in plain commercial language, which parts of the printed-electronics promise were shipping, which were stuck in pilot production, and which were never going to leave the conference poster session.
After the print edition ceased with the consolidation of the trade press in the late 2010s, the title is back. The relaunch is an independent, digital-first newsroom serving the same community: engineers, researchers, product strategists and investors in organic, printed, flexible and stretchable electronics worldwide, with particular attention to the fast-growing India electronics ecosystem.
Our newsroom
The relaunched +Plastic Electronics operates a lean, senior editorial team with backgrounds in electronics engineering, materials science and trade-press journalism:
- Arjun Mehta — Senior Editor, Displays & Asia (New Delhi). Reporting on the display industry since 2014.
- Dr Elena Sørensen — Senior Editor, Materials & Manufacturing. Chemist by training; a decade on the printed-electronics materials beat.
- Miguel Fuentes — Staff Writer, Sensors & Devices (Barcelona). Former embedded-hardware engineer; sensors and the startup ecosystem since 2019.
Full bios, beats and recent reporting are on each editor's profile page; the publication record — including the 2008–2019 Smithers Apex era and the 2026 relaunch — is on our masthead & history page. Every article carries a named byline. We publish analysis, market interpretation and research roundups; we do not republish press releases unedited, and we label sponsored content explicitly. See our editorial policy for the standards we hold ourselves to, including our corrections process and our sourcing standards.
What we cover
- Flexible & OLED displays — foldables, rollables, automotive and the panel-supply chain behind them.
- Printed & flexible sensors — pressure arrays, biosensors, environmental sensing and the readout electronics that make them useful.
- Inks & functional materials — conductive inks, substrates, encapsulation and the chemistry that decides what can be printed.
- Manufacturing — roll-to-roll, sheet-to-sheet, additive equipment, yield engineering and capacity economics.
- Wearables & e-textiles — skin-worn electronics, stretchable circuits and medical patches.
- Research pipeline — organic photovoltaics, organic transistors, flexible batteries and the science moving toward application.
Independence
+Plastic Electronics is editorially independent. Advertising and sponsorship, where accepted, never influence coverage judgements, and commercial relationships are disclosed on the pages they touch. Our allegiance is to the reader trying to understand what is real in this industry — the same position we have held since 2008.