Since the beginning of the year, LED lighting products have become the new darling for policy and fund. Support policies and subsidy programs keep emerging. LED lighting business started to revive from the global economic depression. However, behind the seeming recovery, LED lighting industry still has many cannot-be-ignored problems: lacking of upstream chip technologies, domestic LED lights manufacturers either fluctuate in low profit downstream or produce low quality LED chips. Therefore, indoor LED lighting products can hardly go further. Some LED companies only rely on support policies, impeding the market adaptability.
According to the industrial measure criterion, only when the market penetration of one product reaches 10%, it can be defined as the “take off” of this product. Presently, the penetration of LED high bay lighting products in Chinese market is only 2%. Lacking of core technology yet being artificial spawned raised concerns about LED lighting industry.
Subject to the core technology:
“Traditional energy-saving lamps will be replaced by LED lighting techniques finally. Either in energy saving aspect or in environment aspect, LED street light is better. The shapely raised rare earth prices in 2011 sped up this process.” Said Bujun Cai, assistant manager of WinNews Technology Co., Ltd. LED lighting industry is growing, but we cannot judge just from currently intense investment. Both LED lighting technology and widely used energy-saving lamps are national promoted energy-saving products, aiming to completely replace traditional filament lamps. In 2011 Chinese government released the first filament-lamp-replacing blueprint to ban the sale and import of ordinary filament lamps with power consumptions more than 100W. This plan will be implemented from 1st October, 2012. In the second step, filament lamps with power consumptions more than 15W will be banned to sale and import from 1st October, 2016. But the government tends to promote indoor LED lighting products as equivalent techniques.
The price increase of RE materials in 2011 caused the government’s tendency to LED. Both LED lighting technique and energy-saving lamps need to use RE (rare earth) phosphor materials, but the consumption of RE materials of the former is only 1/1000 of the later. Hit by skyrocketing RE materials prices, many energy-saving lighting manufacturers were forced to close. On the other hand, this price-raising storm also led to the sharply quality reduction of energy-saving products. Unqualified rate is closed to 50%.
