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Lighting market heats up as LED tech glows bright

Lighting products and solutions were an extension of products sold by electrical companies a few years ago. Later, electronics companies, including consumer durable majors, started adding lights to their portfolio as automation kicked in. Of late, with the proliferation of connected devices and the growing LED market, communication companies, the likes of Cisco, have begun to offer lighting solutions.

“Lighting used to be the stronghold of electrical (products and accessories) companies. Now, you have electronics companies like Samsung, LG and Panasonic in the market as lighting solutions include semiconductors similar to the ones in consumer goods,” says Gulshan Aghi, director and CEO (India) of the European lighting major Trilux. “Five years from now we will know who’ll win the race. For now, everyone is competing in what promises to be a Rs 21,000-crore segment by 2020.”

The overall lighting industry in India is worth about Rs 16,700 crore, of which LEDs have a share of Rs 2,650 crore. The LED segment grew by over 15 per cent last year and is expected to grow even faster as the conversion rate to LEDs is over 50 per cent in offices and households.

The mass adaptation of LED products is directly related to the increasing awareness of energy management and a whole host of possibilities to secure infrastructure, which involve technologies including automatic sensing, data transmissions and analytics.

To develop applications of this sort, many global communications companies, including home appliance manufacturers, service providers, retailers, enterprise technology companies and chipset manufacturers, have formed the AllSeen Alliance led by the open-source software company Linux.

In the smart devices segment, residential citizens will lead the way by increasingly investing in smart-home solutions, with the number of connected devices used in smart homes to surpass 1 billion units worldwide in 2017, says Bettina Tratz-Ryan, research VP at Gartner.

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