Ark's Big Ideas for 2021

7. Electric Vehicles

About 10% of the Ark Innovation ETF is invested in Tesla, so it's no surprise the firm sees EV sales increasing 20-fold, from 2.2 million in 2020 to 40 million units in 2025. The firm also sees EV prices coming down and reaching parity with gas-powered cars by 2023. Further, while EV sales were up 33% in 2020, sales of gas-powered cars fell 15%.

8. Automation

Ark predicts that the growing use of automation could add 5%, or $1.2 trillion, to U.S. GDP in the next five years. With the move to more automation, Ark anticipates higher wages for workers, lower prices for consumers, higher margins for companies and higher levels of investment — creating virtuous cycles.

9. Autonomous Ride-Hailing

These services could reduce the cost of mobility to one-tenth the average cost of a taxi today, dropping from $0.70 a mile in 2016 to $0.25 a mile in 2025, spurring widespread adoption. Ark believes these platforms will generate more than $1 trillion in profits per year by 2030.

10. Delivery Drones

Lower battery costs and autonomous technology should power the use of aerial drones, Ark says. It also believes drones will deliver packages, food "and even people" faster in the near future. Thus, drone delivery platforms could generate some $275 billion in delivery revenues, $50 billion in hardware sales and $12 billion in mapping revenue by 2030.

11. Orbital Aerospace

Upon regulatory approval, Ark plans to launch a space-themed ETF and sees this area's opportunity — including satellite connectivity and hypersonic flight — exceeding $370 billion annually.

12. 3D Printing

Ark notes that 3D printing collapses the time between design and production, shifts power to designers and reduces supply chain complexity at a fraction of the cost of traditional manufacturing. Last year, despite being used for everything from ventilator valves to swabs to face masks, its revenues declined. However, Ark estimates 3D printing's annual growth rate at roughly 60%, putting the industry at $120 billion in 2025 vs. $12 billion in 2020.

13. Long Read Sequencing

Ark sees this next generation of DNA sequencing — and more accurate sequencing methods — as "the driving force behind the genomic revolution." By the end of 2025, long-read sequencing should be on cost-parity with short-read sequencing. Long-read revenues could grow 82% a year, with the market set to hit $5 billion in 2025 vs. $250 million in 2020.

14. Multi-Cancer Screening

A convergence of technologies has pushed the cost of multi-cancer screening — which detects dozens of cancers by a single blood test — down from $30,000 in 2015 to $1,500 in 2021; this might drop to $250 by 2025. The market for multi-cancer screening could expand to $150 billion, while averting 66,000 cancer deaths per year in the U.S.

15. Cell and Gene Therapy: Generation 2

The next generation of cell and gene therapy could increase "the total addressable market for oncology therapeutics by more than 20-fold." Another trend is the shift in gene therapies from ex vivo (modifying a patient's cells outside of the body) to in vivo (doing it inside the body). In vivo is more cost effective and could enable gene-editing — and hopefully cure thousands of rare diseases over time. Ark estimates that advances in cellular immunotherapies could create $250 billion in incremental revenues for the industry going forward.

Source: Ark Investment Research "Big Ideas Report 2021"