Sunday, June 28, 2009

High Bright LED Market Overview and Forecast for 2010



Classification of LED by means of Drive Current
20mA is Low power
50-150mA is Medium power
150-1000mA is High Power

The most promising LED growth is the LED for lighting that as CAGR growth of 42% and Mobile application is 35% from 1998-2008

HBLED Market growth is of 2009 is 6.2 times of 1998, with total revenue of exceeding $5,000M in 2008.

Technologic advancement was prominent in year 2000 to 2009, especial the year 2005-2009, a lot of LED has great improved efficacy.

The 100Lm/watt Cool White LED and 80Lm/W warm white LED can be made in volume commercially in 2008. HBLED market continues to grown 11% from 2007 to 2008 to a $5.1B.

Mobile Phone
Mobile phone units continue to drop in 2009 since beginning of 2008 due to the world economic melt down. A senior executive of Nokia told me that that estimated unit produced in 2009 will be around 87% of 2008, (decreases of 13%)
Nokia no long call their product hand phone but handset, as more and more function and feature are embedded on the so called Mobile Phone….GPS, Camera of 8-12 MP…MP3, Radio, TV, office tool, and soon PicoP Projector. The Hi End phone of $600-900 is on one side becoming more expensive and would prolong it life cycle more for 6-12 months. Since end user would need more time to get used to all the functions and it is expensive. Whereas more and more low end phone would be selling at lower cost of $80. ULC hand phone is gone!

White Box Hand Phone
Since 2006, a Taiwanese phone chip maker invented a single MTK chip. Since then it is much easier to make a phone design with the chip that usually took a few years to develop! A lot of White Box business was growing like Spring Asparagus! This has driven the Chinese LED market to supply more the Side View LEDs.

HBLED Growth
As a result of most powerful equipment supplier of LED bonder with Higher production Output per dollar investment over these years since 2003. As other electronics component cycles do, the ASP continuous to drop -12% while mass product makes its tribute to increase at +20% from 2004-2008.
HBLED Unit growth 25% to 48B pieces in 2008.

LED for NB BLU
(Note book back light units) has been commercially available in volume, from the very first prototype display NB unit Cree has made in its Hong Kong regional Office Open Ceremony with an astonishing $700 as cost for a 14” display in 2005. Now the cost is approximately 8% of that!

Net Book Impact
HP, Fujitsu, Acer, Dell, Samsung and Apple all have LED Back Light on its new models. Dell has announced that they will go for 100%.
And yet Net book had created a new market for LED, recently Samsung and LG had announced to go for the Net book market with unconcealed intention of pursue another No. 1 for that market.
The Total net book shipment is 13 million in 2008 and will likely have 26 million this year. End of 2008 and on ward will see a lot of need for Side View LEDs.

Automobile Market
Automobile shipment continues to diminish in 2009, the number vehicles world wide shipment drops 4.3% and for EU, USA and Canada market drops 10%. Though the use of LED is becoming more from 200 to 350 pieces on an automobile, the total LED on Automobile will not be an influenced factor for HBLED growth in 2009-2010. The AFL (auto mobile front Lamp) has been used just for three models of cars in 2008-9, (namely Lexus LS600h, Audi R8 and GM's luxury division, Cadillac has signed on with the German automotive supplier Hella KGaA Hueck & Co., to offer a solution - low glare Light Emitting Diode (LED) headlamps. will be offered on its Escalade Platinum edition SUV. GM has resolved as we do not know if this model will be continue or not or with other name? The only seen successful case is Lumileds who builds the Real Hi Beam LED head lamp for Audi. However due to limited demand at this moment, This AFL impact is insignificant to the LED market as their market demand is too small.

LED Signage and Display
There is growth modestly by LED back light unit LCD TV and monitors and LED projector. LED pico Projector produced but have little impact for the market in 2008. Let’s see how it performs in 2009!

Light Fixture using LED
More than 400 companies are entering this LED light luminaries.
A lot of new application is using LED, both interior an exterior lightings
Volume is small and price is high independent of various product qualities from different supplier. LED is penetrating of niche and general lighting application, growth was 39% but overall volume is still small.
The largest is Architectural market at 43% of market, White LED accounts for 50% of the market. Highest growth market is Outdoor, Replacement Bulb, commercial and industrial and entrainment.
Osram, Philips had introduced their LED light bulbs for direct incandescent lamp replacement. Theirs Price is $40-60 whereas there are numerous Low cost LED lamps using tens of VLED (vertical LED lamp) found in the market at $2-8!. This LED industry is still plagued by these low quality and underperforming LED light fixtures!

LCD TV
Is your home still using Big Glass Bottle of CRT TV? Probably not many!
Many New LCD TV sets from Samsung, LG, Sony, Sharp, are using LED as their back light unit, we have seen a lot of new model in CES 2009. Though there is just around 1% of the TV is using LED Back light LCD display, the upcoming market is Gigantic!
Samsung has launched an aggressive promotional Campaign of $40M. Would continue maintaining its NO, 1 position in LCD TV export world wide. And would differentiatel other with unique thin profile, super picture quality and they would enjoy substantial profitability. Price difference is still high between CCFL ($500 as an average at retail).
Sony is using Hi Power RBG Unit at edge lit configuration to have colour Gamut advantage over CCFL.

Samsung developed the direct back light using low power high enhanced LED for wide colour gamut, enable local dimming and High Contrast on 9 series as top of the line. And a leading adaptor or edge-lit as to trade of full local dimming with thinner profile of 29.5mm on 6000, 7000 and 8000 Series LED TV! In US the model is called Luxia. Edge-lit can have a thin 1” thick, CCFL is 2” thick, and 4” for Direct LED back light. Samsung Claims a reduction of 40% power than CCFL. LG LH 90 Direct back light unit, with a 0.94” thickness using Silicone lenses, Local dimming with 200,000:1 Contrast Ratio, less 73% power consumption using its Smart Sensor system. Sony Bravia XZ1 Series (edge-lit) 0.39” thick.

Other Factors
LED will obtain substantial momentum to grow on Lighting market.
LED will grow 15% in 2009. With the recovery of the world economy, this will have >20% growth in 2010. Direct colour and intensity control plus colour mixing function functionality enhance the broad acceptable by many application designers. Continuous improvement in LED efficacy will further secure the adoption of LED on general white Light market. Maintenance free, long life time plus government body subsidies and regulation (EISA 2007, Title 24 California, EU regulations) are important market Development trigger.

Technical Challenge
Yet a lot of challenge ahead, Human Naked eye is sensitive to see slight different white color changes induce heavy burden for LED Company to product consistent colour, sorting cost becoming higher and handling of logistics in the sorting and binning process an bottle neck for as many as 512 bin Grades. Designing high efficient fixture with simplicity such as AC LED would be a way to reduce the overall installation cost of lighting application. Realistic claims of LED life time, LED fixture efficiency, Life time, quality of light Fixture, heat dissipation rate should be improved to win Customer’s confidence before mass materialization. I have seen a lot of Traffic Lamp, Toll display LED, and Even Hong Kong Express LED light fixture has lot of black out LEDs….
It requires some time to show that the real LED should last. Although I can not deny that some of the LED failure is not just the LED or the associated driver unit!

LED quality
However, as an overall quality, every piece of component should involve good quality engineering design and process optimization and stringent good quality control in the manufacturing stage. Least but not last, the use of proper Good Quality Bonding equipment; die Bonder AD830 and Wire bonder iHawk which are well accepted by almost 80% of the major users in the world.

Overview of 2009 market
The overall market atmosphere is still low until September 2009 that it finds its bottom and will start to grow. We foresee that it will embark a friendlier environment for LED to grow at a higher rate. The major growth is LCD BLU and SSL (solid state lighting) market segment in 2009

Forecast 2010
According to Strategies Unlimited the HBLED market grow will be resumed in 2010 and a CAGR of 19.3% till 2013 with revenue of $12.4B.

Data source: Strategies Unlimited reports

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