LED wars brewing

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Singapore, 22^nd July 2014

Over the last year or so we have seen the emergence of low costs LED manufacturers and I don’t mean the cheap copy, backyard made bad quality stuff (often referred to as Chinese made) but the ones actually manufacturing good and decent quality LED fixtures. Most of our clients do not have the sort of budgets that are normally associated with good quality LED’s and we, the designers, for one have been educating the client about cost and quality and value for money when it comes to LED technology. But while we were keeping in support of the established LED manufacturers (mostly the original conventional lighting manufacturers), the clients, not satisfied with the high prices they were dished out by these “elite” LED producers, started to come up with suggestions of LED manufacturers with very competitive pricing.

Initially we dismissed this as a “cheap” attitude and did not really spent too much time thinking that they were just some other LED Cowboys. However as a courtesy to some of our respected clients we started to engage with these new “kids on the block” and surprisingly with excellent result. So far we have un-earth several companies that are passing our quality tests easily (including dimming performance) but what is even more astonishing is that they come with unbelievably competitive prices in some case only a fraction of what the “usual” LED fitting would cost. And don’t get me wrong they come with all the required test certifications, IES files and so on.

We have now specified these in a couple of our projects with obviously a happy client. The projects are due for commissioning this year so I look out to the final result. Nothing so far suggest we will have any major issues suggesting to me that the LED Czars have a price war brewing…

Light watch 5-120: The LED manufacturing, specifically in Guangdong province (Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhongshan, etc) is massive…it is said that more then 5000 manufacturing plants exist in China alone. Some of them are massive…I visited several of them over the years. Here are some random pictures from Google.