As the world’s most famous new generation light source, LED is known as the most promising green light source in the 21st century, because of its high brightness, low heat generation, long lifetime, non-toxic, recyclable utilization. With the further increase of global LED market, our domestic LED industry is facing great opportunities. But there are also many unprecedented challenges waiting in the front. Currently, LED core technologies and patents are basically controlled in the foreign companies’ hands. It can be said that China’s LED enterprises are just OSAT of the world. They are slowly and painfully moving forward.
After 20 years development, the general global industrial pattern has been formed: Asia, North America, Europe are the three major market center of global LED industry. And most core technologies have also controlled by Nichia Chemical, Toyoda Gosei, Corey, Puri and OSRAM. Several large international manufacturers from Japan, the U.S. and Europe represent today’s LED upstream industrial level, which has significant influences on industrial development, especially in the aspect of price monopoly and technology monopoly. More than 50% core patents are in the hands of large LED enterprise. Relatively, our domestic LED industry is still in the immature stage. 80% applications are from outdoor landscape lighting area, traffic lighting area and other outdoor led high bay light application market. General residential lighting market is still on the way of promoting.
With the rapid development of domestic LED lighting market, more and more foreign companies shifted their attention to China. In recent years, the number of patent applications in our country has showed a significant increasing trend. According to the report “Risks Analysis of Semiconductor Lighting Patents” published by the Development Research Center of the State Intellectual Property Office, there are 22 countries and regions around the world have applied for patents in China. The top five countries are Japan, South Korea, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. Among them, Japan holds a safe lead by 1306 patents, accounting for 24%. In the aspect of valid patents, the ratio of domestic patent applications and foreign patent applications (in China) is around 4:5. However, among these domestic patent applications, companies from Taiwan occupied the most proportion: 53%. Seen from the distribution of industry chain, overseas companies have more patents in LED chip industry and packing industry. More than half of the LED core invention patent applications happened in our county.