Recently, it was learned from the GreenLighting2015 China (Shanghai) International Semiconductor Lighting Application Technology Forum that with the rapid development of my country's LED lighting industry, the scale of the industry continues to expand, the market penetration rate increases rapidly, brands gather together and fission, and various fields are seeking entry points for cross-border integration... Since 2014, the strong development trend of my country's semiconductor lighting industry has been very obvious.
LED lighting continues to improve
It was learned from the forum that the development of the LED industry in 2014 mainly showed three major characteristics: First, the industry’s plate was enlarged. Statistics show that in 2014, the overall scale of my country's semiconductor lighting industry reached 350.7 billion yuan, still maintaining a rapid growth of 36%. LED lighting product sales account for 16.4% of the entire lighting industry, and LED lighting is rapidly expanding into general lighting and other application areas. Among them, the output value of general lighting was approximately 117.1 billion yuan, an increase of approximately 68%, and its proportion in the application market also increased from 34% in 2013 to 41% in 2014. Overall, commercial lighting has shown a blowout growth, public lighting has grown rapidly, and home lighting has also begun to take off.
Second, the market penetration rate has further accelerated. Due to technological improvements and intensified competition, the prices of LED lighting products continue to decline year by year. LED lighting manufacturers continue to increase their efforts to sink channels, e-commerce channels are developing rapidly, and my country's lighting market is accelerating in second- and third-tier cities. The LED lighting market will usher in a period of rapid market growth in 2015, and the LED lighting market penetration rate is expected to increase from 16% in 2014 to 30%.
Third, brands are gathering momentum and fissioning, and cross-border integration. Passive or active mergers and acquisitions and integration between enterprises have become a general trend; product applications are changing from technological innovation to business models of application solutions and integrated service innovation. There have been Wanrun Technology's acquisition of Rishang Optoelectronics, Jiawei's acquisition of Pinshang Lighting, Tongfang's full acquisition of Zhenmingli, etc., involving the upper, middle and lower reaches of the industrial chain. At the same time, the concepts of LED smart cities, smart homes and smart lighting are becoming increasingly popular, allowing Xiaomi, Midea, Haier and other companies to cross-border into the lighting industry.
LED applications present six major trends
“With the development of the industry, general lighting is gradually becoming intelligent and high-end. Intelligence is mainly reflected in the combination of LED lighting technology and control technology. The huge market potential of LED lighting in high-end special application fields such as automobiles, health care, hotels, and museums has gradually been valued.” According to Yang Weiqiao, deputy director of the National Semiconductor Lighting Application System Engineering Technology Research Center, semiconductor lighting applications are currently showing six major trends:
First, the Nobel Prize in Physics effect. The high-efficiency blue light-emitting diode invented by Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura won the Nobel Prize in Physics, which not only brought a transformation to efficient lighting, but also gave the greatest recognition to the value of the semiconductor lighting industry.
Second, application leads industrial development. In 2014, although my country's semiconductor lighting application field was affected by continuous price reductions, it was still the fastest growing link in the industrial chain, with an overall application growth rate of 38%. Among them, the general lighting market exploded with a growth rate of 68%, an output value of 117.1 billion yuan, and its proportion in the application market increased from 34% in 2013 to 41% in 2014.
Third, general lighting tends to be intelligent and high-end. However, my country's high-end smart lighting product market is currently monopolized by products and brands of foreign companies. The huge market potential of LED lighting in high-end special application fields such as automobiles, health care, hotels, and museums has gradually attracted attention.
Fourth, cross industry boundaries. The current single lighting products can no longer meet people's needs for comfort and convenience. With the further development of LED lighting technology, a number of emerging fields such as intelligent multi-mode LED street light systems, LED optical communications, and LED automotive headlights have been expanded and applied.
Fifth, the industry tends to be vertically integrated. Domestic LED giant Sanan Optoelectronics acquired 151 patents owned by it around the world through the acquisition of upstream company American Lumen Company. At the same time, it established a joint venture light source company with Sunshine Lighting, a well-known domestic downstream enterprise, to achieve the integration of the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain and achieve a win-win situation for all parties. Vertically integrated development has become an important measure for domestic upstream and downstream enterprises to achieve common development.
Sixth, the market environment is getting better. Price is no longer the only concern of consumers, and on-demand lighting is accepted by more people. The price has dropped to the market acceptance point, and the price decline of brand products has slowed down significantly.
Innovation-driven improvement of value space
While the LED lighting industry is developing rapidly and market penetration continues to increase, low prices and homogeneous competition have caused the profit margins of many companies to decline sharply, and industrial competition has further escalated. Under the influence of multiple factors, LED lighting has rapidly expanded from general lighting to other application fields, and the development of the industry has also focused more on exploring high value-added product forms and extending to innovative application markets.
Feng Yadong, deputy secretary-general of the National Semiconductor Lighting Engineering R&D and Industry Alliance (CSA), said that the era of multi-level cross-border integration has arrived, and it is mainly reflected in the cross-border integration of technology. For example, semiconductor lighting technology will be combined with microelectronics technology, sensing technology, computers, big data and other fields. Cross-border integration in applications means that new market demands drive industry cross-border innovation, including semiconductor lighting application innovation in agriculture, biology, medical and other aspects. The cross-border integration of business models, that is, the cross-border integration with the Internet as a link, product production-system services-platform operations, as well as the integration of service industry and manufacturing industry, technology and culture integration, thereby enhancing the added value of the industry.
CSA hopes to complete the integration and integration of basic science through science and technology projects and public R&D platforms, such as the integration of energy-saving and efficient material science, photobiology science for biological health, and information science for smart light sources. Integrate multi-field technologies such as communications, control, sensing, information processing, electronics, software, and optics to meet the functional needs of space, people, and objects in the lighting environment; integrate technology innovations for the realization of industrial demonstration and promotion in lighting and display engineering for smart cities and intelligent transportation, lighting and communication engineering that combines the Internet of Things and smart homes, agricultural biological lighting engineering, and light health and medical engineering, and actively carry out cross-sector cooperation to improve standards, certification, and evaluation systems, and work with All companies will work together to explore new business models in the context of the Internet, explore new models for international market expansion, launch LED lighting up the "Belt and Road" initiative, establish and improve a semiconductor lighting industry science and technology service platform with an international public R&D platform, an industrial comprehensive service platform, and an industrial development fund platform as the main body, build an innovation chain, improve the service chain, enhance the value chain for the development of China's semiconductor lighting industry, and open up the growth space of the semiconductor lighting innovative application market.
Yang Weiqiao believes that in order to achieve innovative applications in the semiconductor lighting industry, it is necessary to build a leading domestic LED smart lighting industry and seize the commanding heights of blank spectrum resources and technology patents for next-generation broadband communications.
The deputy director of the Changzhou Base of the State Key Laboratory of Semiconductor Lighting Joint Innovation introduced in detail that the next step for smart lighting must be smart homes. Currently, the National Key Laboratory is considering cooperating with some outstanding large home appliance companies to integrate LED lighting with smart home appliances and APPs with the cloud to build a future ecosystem.
"The vision of intelligent control must be to combine high-quality, high-performance lighting fixtures, intelligently controlled dimming systems, various sensors, etc." Xiao Hongqing, a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, predicted the LED lighting application market in 2015: the LED downstream application market will show explosive growth; technology guides industrial development, intelligent lighting leads profits; LED cross-border integration intensifies.
ANNA