Under strong government supports, the intellectual property environment of LED industry has been greatly improved. The number of patent applications was growing sharply, as well as the quality of patents. However, due to a late start, the domestic LED patent environment is far behind Europe, North America and Japan, even worse than Taiwan. In America and Japan, the LED industry chain started to take shape as early as 1980s. During that period, fundamental technologies of GaN-based LED epitaxial chips on sapphire and Sic substrates were basically completed. However, China’s research institutes and manufacturers started related studies quite recently.
The harsh domestic LED patent environment manifested chiefly by the frequent infringement, the cost of plagiarism is too low, leading to the fact that companies had great investment on technological innovations will not get benefits and advantages at last. Placing a higher value on innovations and intellectual property rights became a formality. Firms committing infringement survived finally. “Copy” is the most common thing in the domestic LED lighting industry. It is very hard for technological innovation seeding thrive under such harsh circumstance.
The marketing promotion of LED lighting applications, like G24 LED bulbs, LED flood lights is carrying out comprehensively. Earlier companies, like Nichia, Cree, Philips has been fully prepared. They intended to get profits from products and market, and also from the patent net that set up earlier. From the more than 100 LED patent related lawsuits and their project progress in the LED lighting industry, we can see that these large enterprises all aimed at the international LED market. Since 2008, Philips started the advancing in LED applications, especially in LED bulbs and LED flood lights, obtaining smooth progress. According to related reports, there are more than 230 companies signed license agreements with them. These companies could use technologies from Philips, and in the meanwhile, paid Philips about 3%-5% of their sales value. This is a very handsome income in the long term.
How about the domestic LED patent environment? It seems that after nearly 20 years development, infringement rarely happened in China. The possible reasons for this situation are: a. China is indeed a special case. Relevant market laws are far from perfect compared with developed countries. b. domestic LED companies are too small to squeeze. c. products from these companies were not a significant danger to international giants.