Worldwide LED outdoor lighting market value grows by 46 percent in 2013

TAIWAN: The latest market report published by LEDinside, a research division of TrendForce showed that LED outdoor lighting replacements will be popular worldwide from 2013 to 2015, with Asian countries including China, Japan, and Taiwan acting most aggressively.

Promoted by the policy, the LED outdoor lighting market value will be up to $2,478 million in 2013, an annual growth over 46 percent. In other emerging countries such as Thailand, Russia, Latin America and Africa, considerable streetlight replacements will also be installed in 2014. The installation of LED streetlight replacements will gradually slow down in 2015, and the number of worldwide LED streetlight replacements and newly installed LED streetlights will be maintained at approximately 10 million/year.

Cities in the US and Canada including San Diego, Seattle, and Los Angeles have successively launched LED streetlight replacement projects in the second half of 2012; local manufacturers such as Cooper Lighting, Cree, and GE Lighting have also successively introduced new product lines in order to meet different application demands. International manufacturers in Europe are in the same direction.

CityTouch, a device launched by Phillips, allows users to monitor the entire city lighting system more easily through the management interface. With the ability to report the immediate condition of each lighting product, CityTouch is already widely used among huge European lighting operators.

The global LED outdoor lighting market grew in 2012, with China’s newly installed streetlights accounting for 30 percent of the global installation. This growth was mainly stimulated by government subsidies; due to export weakness, more industries were optimistic about public lighting energy-saving projects in the Chinese market.
Fierce competition in the market has resulted in a further decrease in product price, shipments are mostly from large manufacturers, yet a certain amount of new manufacturers are still entering the market. LEDinside estimated that along with the government’s subsidy in 2013, Guangdong is expected to achieve 0.3 million installations, becoming the fastest growing regional market of LED outdoor lighting.

With a budget of 2 billion NTD, the LED street light energy saving project launched by Taiwan's Bureau of Energy is expected to replace 250,000 streetlights with LED streetlights from 2013-2014. The most favorable terms is applied in the bidding investigation, which is beneficial to Taiwanese manufacturers that produce chips, LED components, power supply, and heat sinks.

LEDinside indicated that although competitive market price has resulted in a low bidding price, with maintenance and warranty costs, manufacturers may not be able to gain much profit. They may, however, still bring in revenue. Bidding winner, such as Leotek Electronics, Everlight Electronics, Delta Electronics, and Leadray Energy Co. are expected to benefit the most.