â– Text / "New Marketing" reporter Liu Botao Chen Yangfa from Guangzhou
In the process of the domestic LED lighting industry rushing into the rush, on the one hand, people have seen the good development prospects of this industry, on the other hand, people have to worry about many problems in the industry: some technical problems have not been solved, product quality is not Stable; repeated investment, local LE D lighting projects, resulting in waste of resources; lack of standards; upstream chip technology in the hands of others ... and so on, so that people are excited and excited while watching.
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An emerging industry needs to find the transformative power that makes its prospects clear. Before this moment came, it was the chaos and darkness that had to endure before the industry broke.
a dense "patent network"
The LED lighting industry is extremely large, subdividing into three links: upper, middle and lower reaches. In the upstream of the LED lighting industry chain are chip suppliers and luminescent materials suppliers, the middle reaches are packaging companies, and the downstream is LED lighting application companies.
The structure of China's LED lighting industry development focuses on packaging and downstream applications. The output is the world's number one, and the output value ranks second in the world. However, the shortcomings of the industry are also increasingly prominent. The international giants in the upstream sector monopolize patent technology for industrial development. Lay hidden.
Relevant information shows that as of the end of 2008, there were 26,069 patent applications related to LED lighting in China, most of which were patents for packaging and application in the middle and downstream of the industry. In terms of the extension and chip of the upstream industry, the proportion of patents is relatively small due to the late start of research and production in China. Lu Qin, an analyst at Century Securities, pointed out that the LED lighting industry has great differences in the middle and lower reaches. Upstream products are extremely difficult, high-difficult, high-input, and high-risk, while the barriers to entry in the middle and lower reaches are low and lack core technology. LED lighting epitaxial wafers and chips account for about 70% of the industry's profits, LED lighting packaging accounts for about 10% to 20%, LED lighting applications account for about 10% to 20%.
More tangled is that more than 50% of the core patents for LED lighting are monopolized by Japan's Nichia and Toyota Synthetic, CREE, and Philips Lumileds Lighting and Osram in Europe, among which Nichia's patented technology Covering LED lighting structure, epitaxy, chip, package manufacturing process technology and phosphors and other related raw materials, it has an absolute leading position in the field of LED lighting. These enterprises rely on the construction of patent barriers and patent litigation to prevent other manufacturers from entering the market and compete with them, and obtain high monopoly market interests. The five major manufacturers signed a cross-licensing agreement to avoid disputes between them and formed a strong patent alliance.
As the upstream chip is the key to the LED lighting industry, not only affects the performance and price of the entire middle and lower reaches, but the upstream chip suppliers often control the patents and standards of the entire industry. While foreign companies control patented technology, they often wave the "337 investigations" (US 337 investigation procedure: prohibiting all unfair competition or any unfair trade behavior in exports to the United States), so that domestic companies can submit. "When domestic companies quickly keep up with the technology, they will lower the price of the chip. This has happened twice in China. One of them was the price reduction for small power chips in March and April of 2009, when domestic The chip companies are almost all losing money; the second price cut is for high-power chips, because the sales of high-power chips are not large, so its market impact is relatively small." Lighting industry marketing expert Zhang Huming said, "foreign enterprises The control of the industrial chain began at the source, but now their tentacles begin to extend into the field of application."
In fact, some data also reflect the overall flaws of the LED lighting industry. In 2008, the total output value of China's semiconductor lighting was nearly 70 billion yuan, of which the output value of the chip was 1.9 billion yuan, the package output value was 18.5 billion yuan, and the output value of applied products was 45 billion yuan. Chip production accounts for only a small part. Many domestic chip companies have directly moved abroad in research and development. “The savvy thing about foreign companies is that it encourages domestic companies to use piracy like Microsoft, which will exclude other companies from the market. But in the end, the entire market will be very dependent on them. Now, domestic The chips of the enterprise are basically imported.†The deputy general manager of marketing of Myers Lighting Co., Ltd. said, “The small chip field has little gap between domestic and foreign countries, and the technology is quite mature. In the two fields of epitaxial wafers and large chips. The gap between the two sides is too great, and it is impossible for the domestic market to catch up in the short term. Even if it catches up, it cannot circumvent its patents."
Tangled product quality
In addition to the stagnation of patented technology and the scale of capacity, another deadly obstacle comes from product quality. “The performance of domestic high-brightness products still lags behind the world's leading level, and there is still a huge gap in product quality.†Wu Chunhai, director of the Planning and Design Office of Shenzhen Lighting Environmental Management Center, said, “LED Street Lights can be applied on the main roads. Standard level, but in this case, LED street lights are not necessarily more energy efficient than high-pressure sodium lamps." Because the brightness and light efficiency of domestic LED street lamps are far lower than similar products of foreign companies, the promotion of government level has encountered bottlenecks.
“Some production companies claim that their products have a lifespan of 50,000 hours and 100,000 hours, but we can’t grasp the quality of the products.†The quality of the products cannot be judged. The brand products are PK, and after obtaining reliable data through specific experiments, we can finally select high-quality brand products for promotion. Zhao Jinxing, deputy director of the Urban Lighting Professional Committee of the Chinese Municipal Association and member of the Municipal Facilities Expert Committee of the Ministry of Construction, pointed out: "Government departments know that LED lights are the future direction of development because they can replace sunlight and have no damage to the human body. But because of LEDs The price of the lamp is high, the government is not sure which product is good, and he is still hesitating and watching." Xu Baojin, deputy secretary general of Hangzhou Municipal Party Committee, said: "Everyone is talking about LED lighting, but so far the LED lights on the market are not good, not yet. The products of several companies are able to meet market demand, so the government has become more cautious. As long as the products are qualified, the government will purchase them."
From this, we can see the contradictory mentality of local governments: they are not willing to hand over hundreds of millions of orders to foreign companies, and they are not willing to fully use domestically produced LED street lamps that are technically unsatisfactory. The "experimental" mentality welcomes this new thing. According to LED inside statistics of industrial research institutions, among the 21 cities that implement the “Ten Cities and Ten Thousand Cities†program, only Weifang, Chongqing and Baoding have clearly proposed that the installation of LED street lamps should exceed 10,000 baht, mainly due to the standard of Chinese street lamps. Still not baked, and the quality of LED street lights remains to be verified by time. At the beginning of 2009, the market is expected to have a demand of 800,000 to 1.2 million baht, but by the end of the year, the installed capacity is less than 300,000 baht.
In those cities that do "experiments", the promotion effect of LED street lights is not satisfactory. Baoding, Hebei Province, which is known as the "China Power Valley", after four or five months of the introduction of LED street lights, many street lights have experienced severe light decay, or simply do not shine. In Weifang, Shandong, the LED streetlight project adopts the practice of replacing only the light source part with LED lighting, but the traditional lamps are not replaced, and the specific optical and heat dissipation problems are not solved, so that the first batch of street lamps will be eliminated after 4 months. . The second batch of street lights, using a single 1 watt light source to make white light, the light temperature is high and the light intensity is not enough, it seems to give people a blue faint feeling, so that Weifang City was ridiculed by the industry as Shandong "new ghost city."
These are the practical problems that LED lighting faces in the development of specific applications. Despite the bottleneck in the LED lighting market, as Chinese companies make breakthroughs in LED light source technology, the quality of LED lights will continue to increase and costs will gradually decrease. “Any new product has a stage of R&D and innovation, and LED lamps are no exception.†Zhao Jinxing used urban road lighting as an example. “The LED lights are now the same as the high-pressure sodium lamps that came out in the past. In the early 1980s, high-pressure sodium lamps. The price is high, more than ten times higher than the price of high-energy incandescent lamps; the product life is short, only half a year. Now after years of development, the high-pressure sodium lamp has been extended to three years, the light color is more uniform, and the price has dropped to half of the original. Urban road lighting generally uses high-pressure sodium lamps that consume less energy than incandescent lamps."
High cost
In the LED industry, there is a similar "Moore's Law" in the microprocessor industry - Haitz's law, named after Roland Haitz, a former technical scientist at Agilent (leading LED lighting), meaning that the price of LEDs will be every 10 years. The original 1/10, the performance is increased by 20 times.
However, the industry believes that, as far as the current situation is concerned, the price of LED lamps has not been lowered to a suitable position. On the one hand, this means that price factors will become the threshold for restricting consumption. For many companies, it also means investing in LED lighting. The industry has great risks.
"In terms of price, the price of LED lighting products is still high, coupled with people's low awareness of LED, which has become a difficult point in market development." Zhu Jianping, chairman of Zhejiang Juguang Technology Co., Ltd. said. Zhang Dewei, general manager of Jialida Lighting Co., Guzhen Town, Zhongshan City, also believes that the high price of LED lamps has become the cause of chaos in the entire market. “Many LED lighting companies use the psychology of most consumers to pursue low prices, regardless of product quality, focus on the price of competition, and get the market by price war. This leads to many inferior products circulating in the market, and consumers are There is not much knowledge about lighting products, and it is easy to compromise on price, but once they buy inferior products, they will blame the entire industry, which is not conducive to the promotion of LED lighting products." Zhang Dewei said.
High product prices have become a headache for the entire industry. Some companies, such as Qinshang Optoelectronics and Concentration Technology, are trying to reduce the cost of products through strategic cooperation with upstream chip manufacturers, but this method has limited space for cost reduction and is not universal.
High industry investment and a relatively long cost recovery process have become important factors limiting the scale of LED lighting participants. Although the whole industry seems to squander the taste of “more money, faster comingâ€, the reality often violates the original intention of the people. Take the IT giant Inspur Group as an example. As early as 2007, it has incorporated the optoelectronics industry into its strategic plan, and through its subsidiary Shandong Langchao Huaguang Optoelectronics Co., Ltd., it produces applications such as epitaxial wafers, dies and street lamps. Inspur Group has entered the LED lighting industry, and it needs to invest 4 billion yuan. If the reference production capacity is the first in China, Sanan Optoelectronics' 2008 operating income is 213 million yuan. It takes a long time for Inspur Group to recover its investment. Even Sanan Optoelectronics has spent 1.5 billion yuan on LED lighting. The investment of over 100 million yuan is not something that ordinary companies can do. Coupled with the lack of professional technology, the return on investment of enterprises is not high, thus increasing the risk of investment. The government's eager eyes are still attracting middle and lower reaches of the mainstream of packaging companies and application companies.
According to statistics, 40% of LED lighting companies come from traditional light source manufacturers, 40% from LED companies, and another 20% from manufacturers that are not related to the industry but are optimistic about LED lighting prospects. Although LED lighting will replace traditional lighting has become the industry consensus, but cost and technology have become an important factor to curb the enthusiasm of manufacturers. “The excessive input cost has become a factor of concern for many traditional lighting industry manufacturers. Many companies interested in the LED lighting industry are blocked from the threshold.†Yan Guohua, general manager of Shenzhen Liansheng Photoelectric Co., Ltd. believes that “some traditional lighting Enterprises and distributors are still waiting and watching, and once the market is truly mature and prices are reduced to a certain extent, they will cut into the LED lighting market by directly purchasing light sources."
Heavy industry capacity
It is understood that the main technologies upstream of the LED lighting industry chain include substrate design, epitaxial wafer generation, and finally chip formation. According to the different requirements of luminous efficiency, it can be divided into high power chips and low power chips. In terms of applications, low-power chips are mainly used in mobile phones, notebook computers and TV indicators, etc., where the requirements for luminous efficiency are not very high, and high-power chips are mainly used in fields where the market prospects are good for street lighting.
"Small power chips have low material quality requirements for epitaxial wafers, and the technical difficulty is low. Many domestic LED lighting companies have mastered low-power chip technology, while high-power LED lighting has high requirements for epitaxial materials, if the material growth quality is not high. Will lead to low chip conversion efficiency and heat." Wu Xuming, a technical expert at the Institute of Semiconductors of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, "In addition to the epitaxial material problem, the main technical difficulties of high-power chips are secondary optical design and heat dissipation. Design and power system design, etc."
In this context, it is extremely difficult for Chinese companies to get a slice of the upstream industry chain of LEDs. Only a small number of companies can survive in the cracks. "Domestic LED lighting companies, 8 out of every 10 companies that use high-power chips are chips produced by foreign companies, and about 5 of the 10 companies that use low-power chips are domestic chips." Dr. Zhang Xiaofei, CEO of the online CEO and LED Lighting Industry Research Center, said.
In China, there are more than 30 enterprises and institutions engaged in upstream epitaxial wafers, chip research and development and production. Among them, Sanan Optoelectronics is one of the most complete enterprises in the LED lighting industry chain in China, except for epitaxial wafers, chips and packages. Also involved in the development of application products, its LED lighting products account for 58% of the total domestic production capacity, with an annual output of 550,000 LED lighting epitaxial wafers and 16 billion chips, but subject to the bottleneck of upstream equipment supplier capacity, facing downstream from the downstream A large number of orders can only be shaken.
The two MOCVD equipment manufacturers AIXTRON and VEECO in the United States have a capacity of only 180 units a year, corresponding to an annual output of about 58 billion cores, and the potential demand for global LED lighting chips in 2010 will be It has reached 230 billion, which does not include the future LED lighting application market. MOCVD equipment manufacturing has a special monopoly and limited production capacity, and Chinese companies can only suffer from long waits. Although the chip production of domestic enterprises has grown by a large margin, it can only meet the demand of domestic packaging enterprises by 20% to 30%.
Since LED chips are not only used in lamps, but also widely used in traffic light, mobile phones, notebook computer background light sources and other fields, in recent years, due to the rapid development of mobile phones, notebook computers and other industries, the demand for chips has grown rapidly. The limitation of production capacity has become the bottleneck of the development of China's LED industry. Chip maker Lumei has an annual production capacity of 4 billion chips. However, "capacity limitations may become a bottleneck restricting the development of Lumei LED." Xiao Zhiguo, president of Lumei Group, has some helplessness.
The domino effect caused by capacity has already emerged, which has had a great impact on the entire industry chain. "In the past, we produced an LED Street Light, and the direct investment amounted to more than 20 million yuan. It took three years to complete. After so much money, the mass production was not realized. No company can solve the problem of mass production, not only This is true for domestic companies, as well as international giants,†said Lou Manyu, chairman of Zhejiang Miles Lighting Co., Ltd. The lack of scale in production capacity has become a huge obstacle to the development of the LED lighting industry. As the scale of production capacity has been stagnant, the price of LED lighting products cannot be lowered.
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