The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games completely fueled LED products. The site of the “magic picture” on the opening ceremony attracted the attention of the world, bringing them the magic charm from LED lighting technology.
At present, more than half of the core technologies and patents in the LED lighting industry are concentrated in the United States, the Europe and other developed countries. Our country was lacking of technologies and patents in the field of LED and also a unified standard. Besides, the price war, the quality variation, the vicious competitions from low-power LED lighting products and the lack of high-end products made the domestic LED market fell into a poor state of development.
LED is a kind of device that can convert electrical energy into optical energy. As the most-watched lighting source in the world, LED lighting industry has been marked as one of the country’s seven strategic emerging industries. Tremendous opportunities attracted capital from various quarters. According to publicly available data, there are more than 8000 LED manufactures in China.
The past six months, there are 8 domestic LED lighting enterprises successfully listed, and six of which has listed on GEM. On the other hand, in the past year, the domestic small and medium LED companies frequently closed down. In 2011, there are 80 LED lighting companies closed down in Shenzhen, and 10% small sized LED companies went out of business in other cities and regions in Guangdong Province.
It is worth nothing that as the flourishing domestic LED lighting market, more and more foreign enterprises shifted their attentions to China. Especially in recent years, the number of patent applications in the LED field increased significantly. In addition, from the point of view of industrial chain distribution, patents in the field of LED chip technologies and packaging technologies are mainly from Europe, North America and Japan.
Compared with other foreign companies, China’s LED patent applications were usually at a disadvantage. According to the Institute of Engineering LED industry’s survey, by the end of 2008, there were 26071 pieces of LED-related patents applications in China, most of which (more than 50%) were concentrated in LED mid-stream industries and downstream packaging industries. Only a few of them were from upstream led tunnel light chip core area.