Semiconductor lighting LED: Third Generation Lighting revolution

Since the birth of the world's first semiconductor light-emitting diode in 1960s, LED lighting has long been known as the third revolution of human lighting due to its long life, energy saving, rich color, safety and environmental protection. Obviously LED lighting benefits, all countries in the world in support of the government to accelerate the pace of LED to replace the traditional lighting lighting, the United States, Japan, EU, South Korea, Taiwan and China government has formulated the corresponding development plan. Chinese, to save energy and achieve sustainable economic and social development, in June 3, 2009 to develop a "plan" of energy, the semiconductor lighting industry conforms to the macro policy of energy saving and emission reduction. Since 2005 the Ministry of science and technology, Dalian, Xiamen, was approved by the Shanghai, Nanchang, Shenzhen and other five semiconductor lighting industrial base, in 2007 and 2008 have been approved by Shijiazhuang, Yangzhou and other two semiconductor lighting industrial base, to give long-term support in policy, tax and capital.

The global LED market size of approximately $4 billion 700 million in 2004, according to iSuppli estimates in 2008 increased to $6 billion 900 million, an average annual growth rate of about 13%, including high brightness and high brightness LED market average annual growth rate of about 20%, the two together accounted for the overall market share of 2/3, high brightness LED single market reached $1 billion 600 million. In the high brightness LED products, GaN based chips due to high value-added products, countries (regions) to expand production capacity. GaN chip production capacity mainly concentrated in Taiwan and Japan, but China and South Korea's rapid growth in production capacity, has become an important production area.

LED industry faces patent competition

The patent technology in the development of LED and the role of its unique patent distribution, patent transfer, licensing and disputes will greatly affect the future development of the LED industry pattern. The core patent LED lighting technology is basically a few large companies of foreign control, such as Japan's Nichia, TOYOTA synthesis, Lumileds of America, Toshiba, CREE, OSRAM of Germany. These companies use their core patents, to take the horizontal (while entering a number of countries) and vertical (continuous improvement of the design, for subsequent applications) to expand the way in the world, the layout of a strict patent network.

For later Chinese and South Korea LED industry, although the LED industry has a certain scale, but because of the passive in the patent technology, its development is a big constraint by patent, this is the case in the Taiwan area is the most prominent Chinese. Nichia is still the main sponsor of technology transfer, licensing and litigation. Due to the dominance of the LED blue chip and white LED patent technology, Nichia in the next few years will continue to be in the dominant position of patent transfer, licensing, litigation. Although the Osram based European and American enterprises have a positive attitude to the technology transfer authorization, but by the patent holder, the patent license is dominated by Nichia to determine. From the number of cases of authorization and the number of disputes, the Nichia led to occupy about 60% of all authorized and disputes, followed by Osram, this situation in recent years will not be much change.

China's LED technology started late, in the LED patent is in a passive situation, the development is not optimistic. With the continuous expansion of the scale of the enterprise, it is possible to be involved in the patent dispute by the attention of the big international companies. It is generally expected that within 2 years there will be no large-scale litigation against China's enterprises, but in the long term there is a great deal of domestic enterprises. With the expansion of the domestic LED export scale, the reduction of patent litigation in Taiwan and South Korea, we can not exclude the possibility that Nichia and other large companies will transfer the patent litigation to Chinese mainland enterprises.

Global LED market application structure

The application of mobile phone market in 2004 accounted for more than half of the high brightness LED market, with the application of mobile phone market saturation, the growth rate will slow down the high brightness LED market, estimated growth rate reached 20%, the total market sales amounted to about $4 billion 700 million. Emerging applications such as general lighting market, car headlights, large screen LCD backlight brightness will become a new driving force for the growth of the LED market, in the promotion of large screen LCD backlight, LCD backlight in 2008 26% market share, high brightness LED market doubled. 2008 LED market total sales reached $6 billion 900 million.

The future landscape lighting and general lighting LED market growth rate is the fastest, iSuppli is expected to landscape lighting LED market share will increase from 2% in 2003 to 08 in the year of 8%. 2004 LED lighting sales is $94 million, to 2010 will grow to $875 million, an average annual growth rate will reach 52.3%, then LED lighting will be lighting in the global market of $12 billion to $14 billion to occupy an important position.

Analysis of LED demand growth in the next 5 years

China's current GDP to maintain rapid growth, but relative to the energy consumption per unit of GDP in developed countries, China is in the high energy consumption in exchange for the rapid growth of GDP, this GDP growth needs to change. The rapid development of China's economy is facing the pressure of a variety of energy, energy shortage is one of the biggest challenges facing the government. The Chinese government has also begun to implement energy-saving lighting program, the goal is to reduce energy consumption by 10% by 2010. For electricity in the current lighting throughout the electricity proportion, we can see that Chinese lighting electricity accounted for less than the world's major developed countries, but also lower than the global average, industrial electricity consumption accounted for relatively high, so that the unit of GDP.