Observe: The LED lighting industry has a bright future and product expansion is serious

Speaking of lighting, most people will think of incandescent, fluorescent, energy-saving lamps, but may not be familiar with the LED. In fact, LED is a semiconductor that can convert electrical energy into light energy. It has the characteristics of long life, high luminous efficiency, and low power consumption. From the viewpoint of energy conservation, LEDs will bring considerable energy-saving benefits after large-scale adoption. Therefore, this industry is considered as a sunrise industry in the field of new energy. In recent years, the industry has become very hot under the country's attention. Various capitals have flocked to them. Since the first half of this year, 8 LED lighting companies have been successfully listed. However, unexpectedly, at the end of last year, only over 500 LED companies failed to close in Shenzhen. What kind of industry is this? Why is it experiencing the situation of the ice and the fire?

Liu Fei, general manager of the Gome Electrical Appliance Group's store business technology development center. For more than a year, he was busy with a seemingly inconspicuous, but very important task - to reduce the company's operating costs through LED lighting products.

The lighting products mentioned by Liu Fei are just ordinary LED fluorescent lamps. These lamps have a great relationship with the company's operating costs. Beijing Gome Electrical Appliances Co., Ltd., which has just opened more than two months ago in Beijing’s North Fourth Ring Road, uses LED lamps for all lighting lamps. There are about 475. The power of the LED lamp here is 20 watts. The power of the fluorescent lamp originally used is 45 watts. From the standpoint of the difference in power alone, it can bring about a saving rate of more than 56% and a saving of more than 100 kWh per year.

Roughly speaking, this store can save at least 50,000 kWh of lighting electricity a year. Liu Fei told reporters that just looking at a store, the lighting cost saved does not seem to be a lot, but if all the stores in the country are replaced with this kind of light, the electricity savings will be a huge number. “Our 1,700 stores all push LEDs in this state, and basically we can replace more than 2 million lamps. By doing so, we can save more than 200 million kWh of electricity a year.”

Calculating at a commercial price of 1 yuan per degree, saving 200 million kWh of electricity each year is equivalent to reducing the operating costs of the company to 200 million a year, which is equivalent to the direct operating income of several hundred franchised stores.

LED lighting products not only have obvious advantages in energy saving, but also have better service life and light comfort than ordinary fluorescent lamps. A few days after the fluorescent lamp was used, the brightness was much lower, but the LED lamp's light had great directivity and reduced waste.

It's not just Liu Fei who feels this way. He is also the manager of the development department at Yanghuatang Mall in Wangfujing, Dongsanhuan, Beijing. Liu Ye mentioned the three advantages of LED lights: The first is that the brightness is higher than before, the second can save electricity, and the third is a very long service life.

Since 2010, Liu Ye's shopping mall has gradually replaced more than 10,000 ordinary 30-watt fluorescent lamps with LED lamps. The power has been reduced to 10 watts. Not only the lighting effect is even better than that of fluorescent lamps, but the lighting cost of shopping malls has also been reduced by 60%. Above, we can save 1 million yuan annually. Before deciding to use LEDs, Liu Hao found a lot of manufacturers and did a lot of projects and experiments, including how much illumination can be achieved and how much energy saving can be achieved. Finally, he finally saw the results.

According to statistics, LED lamps with equal luminous efficiency can save more than 80% energy compared with incandescent lamps and 50% more than energy-saving lamps. China's lighting power consumption accounts for about 12% of the total electricity consumption of the entire society. According to the annual power consumption of 4 trillion kWh, the annual lighting power consumption is about 500 billion kWh. If LED lights are used, annual energy saving will be 200 billion degrees or more. The excellent energy-saving performance of LED lighting products is currently irreplaceable, but what is the market selling?

The reporter went to the Bandung Huiyang Lighting Market in Beijing's West Fourth Ring and found a shopkeeper named Lin Liangyu. Lin Liangyu has been operating the lighting business in this market for seven years. In the last two years, he has gradually shifted his store business from operating traditional lamps to selling LED lamps. "Now using 5 watts and 6 watts to achieve the previous brightness, the former was 40 watts of brightness. LED products save more than half energy, but the effect is better than before."

Although the energy-saving effect of LED is impeccable, at present, LED lighting business is not good. A brand LED lamp is several times or even more than ten times more expensive than an ordinary incandescent lamp. It would not have a competitive advantage in terms of price; while a large number of low-quality, low-quality LED products that are in troubled fish on the market make their retail business even more difficult. Difficult to do. Lin Bo’s LED lights are relatively high-grade, and they do not take the cheap wholesale route. There are still many products in the market that cost only a few bucks and a dozen bucks. Although the amount of PV is not enough, the people only think that they are cheap. . Retail is not good to do, Lin Boss's business is mainly directed at engineering customers with energy-saving needs to follow the order.

Zhou Haihua, who is also a lighting business, started doing LED lighting business in 2005. He told reporters that although LED lighting product development and quality have become more and more mature in these years, the development of the terminal application market is still relatively slow. From 2005 to 2008, the application of LED in that outdoor area was comparatively more. After 2008, the interior began to start slowly.

Zhou Haihua believes that because of the high price, LED lamps and lanterns have only limited acceptance for ordinary consumers. Therefore, they are still selling more than 90% of LED lighting products to some engineering and commercial projects. “At present, there are many projects. Whether indoor or outdoor, a project may have a stronger ability to accept this type of product. After all, the quantity is still large. Although the number of ordinary people is huge, the number of individual applications is still relatively small.”

Switching on LED lighting can give Gome an operating cost of 200 million, which is really a big deal. It stands to reason that such products should be buoyed by the market, but what we see in the market is the coldness of consumers. Why does this happen? What kind of development stage is the industry currently in?

LED light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are solid-state semiconductor devices that convert electrical energy into visible light and have been widely used in the domestic lighting industry for the last ten years. At present, the domestic LED industry chain consists of three parts: the upstream industry represented by epitaxial wafers and chip technology, the midstream industry represented by packaging technology, and the downstream industry represented by LED application products.

The reporter came to the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions where the LED industry is relatively dense. He visited the Semiconductor Semiconductor Co., Ltd. of Nantong City, Jiangsu Province. It is an LED upstream company specializing in epitaxial wafers and chip production. It was invested by Tongfang Co., Ltd. in 2010 for 30 years. Billion yuan to establish.

The reporter came to Tongfang’s LED chip production workshop and found that workers are all wearing white coats and masks, because only in a constant temperature, humidity, and dust-free environment can this white machine produce qualified LED chips. This kind of chip is the most crucial raw material for producing LED lighting products. The quality of the chip directly determines the quality of LED products.

Zhan Runzi, general manager of Tongfang Semiconductor Co., Ltd., said: “Energy saving is achieved by changing the structure inside. It's like we make cakes. The more layers we make, the more complicated my process, and the more luminous efficiency it will have, actually, The entire core technology is in extension, including our peers."

Currently, Tongfang Semiconductor owns nearly 60 such epitaxial wafers and chip growth devices called "MOCVD". The annual output of the wafers is about 2 million, which is a leading position among domestic chip manufacturers. Zhan Yun told reporters that because the MOCVD equipment is all dependent on imports, the unit price of a single unit is as much as 2.5 million US dollars, coupled with the scarcity of the technicians who will use such sophisticated equipment, making this kind of high investment and high technical requirements. LED upstream chip production costs remain high. "The domestic market is currently - as far as I know - our (including) technical teams used by our peers are basically from the Taiwan region."

According to report, in the LED industry chain, the expensive upstream epitaxial wafers and chip manufacturing are usually considered to be the highest profits, once attracting a large number of domestic industry investors. In the short period of four years from 2007 to 2011, China's MOCVD equipment grew from 50 to 720, and this year's domestic MOCVD equipment has increased to nearly 1,000. In 1998, there were only 3 related companies in China. In 2011, there were nearly 100 domestic chip manufacturers.

It looks like the industry is great, but it is not. "Currently it can be said to be a deer, or chaos. There is no order. Large-scale investment has caused the confusion of the entire product and chaos in the market. In addition, the application is still at the application end before the national policy is not particularly clear. In the lighting segment, the terminal lighting market, home lighting, and empirical lighting, there is not much pulling on the above. For this industry, it is still developing, and it has encountered a big bottleneck, said Zhan Runzi.

indeed so. The rapid increase in the number of LED chip companies has caused serious talent shortages and excess MOCVD equipment. Starting last year, LED chip prices have fallen sharply. In 2010, Zhan Runzi's original film can be sold for $ 100, and the current market price is only $ 30, but the cost, including capital investment, personnel, costs have not changed, or even higher. When the industry is disorderly, it causes a vicious increase in personnel, which is a great burden on the development of the company.

It is not only LED chip upstream companies such as Tongfang Semiconductor, but LED manufacturing companies in the downstream of the industry are also experiencing similar troubles.

The domestic home appliance manufacturer Midea Group began to enter the LED lighting industry in 2004. Its commercial lighting project director Duan Xianchun has been in the LED lighting field for more than 10 years. Duan Xianchun told reporters that in recent years, the people who came to rush to eat LEDs were all sorts of things. They had to do logistics, do tires, and even manage the canteens to blindly squeeze in and do LEDs. Many of the original companies that do hardware purchase LED lamps from the upstream, after a simple assembly, transformed into a LED company.

Duan Xianchun believes that the current status of China's LED industry has two characteristics: First, many companies, but not many profitable companies. Second, there is less investment in research and development, and there is still a gap between technology and well-known international companies. "There is really not much real investment in R&D. Everyone spends a lot of energy in lighting applications and invests less in R&D."

Surprisingly, many of LED's high-tech lighting products come from small factories, several electric irons, and a bunch of LED lamp parts, which can produce LED lamps. It is this workshop-style LED company that produces products that are very cheap but of poor quality and are flooded with the market. Low-quality and inferior LED products not only disrupted the market price, but also caused consumer's trust in LED products to be greatly reduced, leading to a vicious cycle. The same product, some 5 yuan, 10 yuan, some can sell 50,100 yuan. Low-priced product quality will certainly not be very good. When it flows to the market, consumers buy these products and find it is not easy to use. They will feel that LED products are not good, affecting consumer buying enthusiasm.

In the eyes of Duan Xianchun, the current LED industry is a mixed bag, and in the LED industry intensive Guangdong, Wu Wenfeng is one of the many people who hold this view.

Wu Wenfeng, president of Guangdong Yayi Lighting Technology Co., Ltd., used eight words to describe the status quo of the industry: a mess and a mess. At the beginning of industrial development, many people are optimistic about this industry, all walks of life, all aspects of the capital, all aspects of the talent are poured in, LED industry has expanded very quickly in a very short period of time, but in fact the LED industry There have been two cases: the industry is hot and the market is cold, so companies in the industry are under tremendous pressure. Vicious competition and price competition have already appeared in the market, and the standards and specifications of products have not been unified. "The appearance of the same but the price is very different" is a common occurrence, which has formed a situation of vicious competition and chaotic competition.

This vicious competition in the LED industry, the price war makes a lot of LED companies unprofitable. Coupled with the severe export situation this year, companies do not have core technology, rely on the core technology of others to buy, the cost has increased greatly, many LED companies struggle.

“This time we Guangzhou has just finished a Guangya lighting exhibition. The LED industry companies in China have basically participated in this exhibition. At the end of the exhibition, the organizers invited the top 100 Chinese LED companies to participate in the exhibition. A thank you dinner, the host made a joke, said that the owner of LED is so thin, everyone laughed.” Wu Wenfeng tells such a joke-like story, but it does reflect the status quo of the industry: In this area of ​​big investment and low profit, everyone can not eat well or sleep well.

In the context of energy shortages, saving electricity has become the consensus of all countries in the world. Both developed countries in Europe and the United States, and neighboring countries such as Japan and South Korea have set a timetable for the exit of incandescent lamps, and China is no exception. This means that hundreds of billions of China's lighting market cakes are waiting to be divided, while the government's support for subsidies, LED lighting industry is like a shot of doping, lost time to join the carnival. At the same time, in this high-tech industry that requires high investment, due to the frenzied pursuit of capital, production capacity rapidly expands in a short period of time. The result of inflation has brought about vicious competition, and this market has also become mixed. Before the civilian market has yet to recognize this market, there has been a cruel picture of industry reshuffle.

Starting in 2009, domestic investment booms in the LED industry once set, 70% of which were invested in the lower reaches of the middle reaches of the downstream packaging and application areas, according to the statistics of the LED Industry Research Institute of Gaogong, 2010, the national downstream LED lighting The total investment in the application field is 23 billion, and in 2011, the investment in the application field was as high as 40 billion. However, from the beginning of this year, investment in the LED industry began to decline significantly. Dong Yunting, president of the China Electronics Enterprise Association, told reporters that in the first quarter of this year, there were only more than 100 million yuan, a year-on-year drop of 60%. ‖

In fact, due to the decline in exports, the lack of core technology leading to profit reduction, disorderly industry competition and other issues exist, from last year, domestic small and medium-sized LED companies frequently closed down - as of the end of last year, only one Shenzhen City, closed down LED lighting companies For more than 80 companies, Foshan, Guangdong, nearly one-tenth of the LED lighting companies closed down in mid-2011, and LED lighting companies in Dongguan and Zhongshan also fell into the cold wave of closure.

Faced with this problem, Dong Yunting gave an answer. “There are more than 100 companies in our midstream that have closed down. This downstream company has more than 300 companies closed down. Why? From the perspective of the industry chain, from the perspective of the price chain, profits are mainly concentrated in the upper reaches, and upstream accounts for about 70%. The midstream is also encapsulated by 10% to 20%, and the application is also 10% to 20%. We are always at the low end of the value chain. Generally after you have this homogenous competition, prices will drop significantly and profits will continue to decline. Then the business is difficult to sustain."

The LED industry is turning from cold to hot, and the pain is inevitable. Moreover, this industry adjustment and reshuffle is not a bad thing for the entire LED industry. Due to the chaos of the entire industry and weak corporate strength, it has led to the closure of a number of enterprises in the past two years, and a group of new companies have entered, achieving a “shuffle” effect. Through shuffling, the mergers and acquisitions are actually completed, and the industry will gradually follow the normative path.

Wang Lianghai, vice president of Tongfang Co., Ltd., also has his own opinions. He believes that although the entire LED industry is currently facing difficulties such as overcapacity and severe homogeneity competition, there are not many LED lighting companies with strong real technology and strong brand competitiveness. The market potential is still huge.

China is a major producer of lighting, but China is not a big country of the brand. China's large number of lighting products are made for others. The transformation of traditional lighting into LED lighting has provided many companies with an opportunity to transform themselves into branded companies. Tongfang also hopes to seize this opportunity.

Wang Lianghai believes that because the core technology is still in the developed countries, talent and technology are still the shortest boards in the development of the domestic upstream LED industry, and the downstream LED products have also seriously hindered the application of the products because of high prices and vicious competition in the market. . Tongfang is trying an internationally popular marketing model to bring LED terminal products to market. Because of the small scale of production, the cost will naturally be higher, but through the adoption of the EMC model, a large number of these lightings are used in such commercial lighting and office lighting, and the energy saving effect is still very obvious.

Liu Fei, General Manager of the Gome Store Business Technology Development Center, gave a report to the reporter. They have more than 1,700 stores across the country and need to replace 2 million LED lamps with a replacement cost of up to 400 million yuan. However, if the EMC model is adopted, all the previous lights and construction renovations will be performed by the same team. They do not need to spend a penny in the early stages. This model is equivalent to paying in installments. Some of the savings in electricity bills are made by the two companies. Liu Fei pays the factory to purchase money in accordance with the month and according to the year. The project ends after the cost has been paid. Can achieve maximum benefits.

Liu Fei told reporters that from this year onwards, they will work with Tongfang to gradually replace the lighting of more than 1,700 stores across the country with the LED lights of the same side, and strive to complete the renovation of this energy-saving lighting fixture for most stores by the end of this year.

Data show that in 2011, the overall scale of domestic LED lighting and other application areas was 121 billion yuan, and the overall growth rate reached 34.44%, which is the fastest growing link in the LED industry chain. According to the roadmap for eliminating incandescent lamps issued by China last year, since October 1st this year, it will ban the sale and import of incandescent lamps for general lighting of 100 watts or more. Incandescent lamps will gradually withdraw from the stage of history and replace existing incandescent lamps. The market size will exceed 100 billion yuan. According to the "12th Five-Year Plan" for the development of semiconductor lighting technology in China, by 2015, China's LED lighting industry will reach 500 billion yuan, and LED lighting products will account for 30% of general lighting. Wang Lianghai said that the application of LED lighting this year has grown faster than last year, and China is very likely to be the fastest growing region in the world outside of Japan.

Dong Yunting, chairman of the China Electronics Enterprise Association, believes that the LED industry's future development prospects are beyond doubt, but in the face of irrational LED industry layout, homogenization and vicious competition and other issues, in addition to allowing the market to freely reshuffle, the government should also conduct appropriate guidance. And encourage and promote the sound development of LED industry. “I think we still need to have a unified plan, we must re-lay out, integrate, and reorganize. Second, I think that the corresponding industry (support) policy should be introduced. Because of the prospect of development, I think the government should start from the fund. The support of the government will increase its support, and through subsidies, it will be the same as the home appliance subsidies in the past two years. This may drive the industry faster."