At present, LED manufacturers should meet the demand of LCD panel producers and LCD TV manufacturers, and meanwhile, the demand of LED backlighting producers. In order to deal with these situations, LED manufacturers speeded up the pace of cutting off costs and improving performances. In addition, they were also committed to increase productivity. They have the same goal: produce Cheap LED Lights to attract more consumers.
In Japan’s LED lighting industry market, the cost-cutting target in 2014 of LED lighting applications was 0.5 yen/lm. The current cost is around 1-1.5 yen/lm. Originally, the government and Japan’s LED manufacturers planned to realize this target within 3 years, now reduced to 2 years. Thus, prices of LEDs will gradually be consistent with the LCD panel industry. In the aspect of performance, the government and related manufacturers planned to realize 200lm/W in 2014. At the current rate of development, this target can very likely be realized in advance.
Some experts expressed their support to the promotion of cheap LED lights. In their opinion, thank to the increasingly intense competitions among established LED makers and new-born LED producers, the trend of production costs dropping and performance improving “pushed” the entire LED lighting market into a larger virtuous circle.
For example, the current average price of LED bulbs is less than 4000 yen. If this price can keep pace with the dropping speed of LED chips, it is estimated that in about 2 years, the average price of LED bulbs will drop by half, which will definitely make LED bulbs completely take place of traditional filament bulbs and other energy-saving bulbs and become the dominate products in the residential lighting market.
In order to further occupy the lighting market, many LED makers began to invest in new technologies. Chips, phosphor and packaging, a lot of technologies that used on LED lighting applications has been improved at different levels.
However, in the aspect of economy, fluorescent LED (straight) tubes are far less valuable than traditional fluorescent lights. But this condition may probably be changed due to the estimated outburst of LED lights (costs reduction and improving performances) in 2014. Although the initial production costs of LED tubes are much higher than traditional fluorescent tubes, in consideration of the other aspects, like service life, power consumption and environmental production factor, customers may probably choose the former rather than the later.