OLED lighting market under LED trend is rapidly expanding

OLED lights, which began to participate in the lighting market competition. The lighting industry has made great changes with the key to energy conservation. Frankly speaking, from the perspective of OLED lamps alone, it may be a loss. Although it cannot predict the time of profit, it cannot but introduce its own products. An executive from a large lighting company expressed sighs at the sharp drop in prices and rapid growth of OLED lamps.

OLED lamp as a knocking door will impact the lighting industry structure

Taking OLED lamps as a stepping stone, OLED will soon have a huge impact on the industrial structure of the lighting industry. In the past, Japan's lighting market was less than 1 trillion yen (approximately 74.8 billion yuan) and has been monopolized by the top five lighting giants.

The production of fluorescent lamps requires sophisticated glass processing and requires the investment of huge production equipment. Each production line exceeds 10 billion yen (approximately 748 million yuan). Under such circumstances, new players are almost impossible to compete. After the distributors have purchased the goods, they are also periodically sold. This is a traditional business model with long history.

OLED, as a semiconductor product, is completely different from the existing lighting market environment. Like DRAM (memory) and liquid crystal, which are also semiconductor products, they may face fierce competition in the rapidly falling prices and market share. Toshiba Kenji, director of the OLED product planning department of lighting technology OLED, said: In 2011, the competition will further intensify, and there will be room for price reduction of 10% to 20%. There may be manufacturers who withdraw from the price war early.

Although, OLED product prices continue to decline at a rate of 20% per year. However, the industry generally believes that the price of OLED products will further decline. The reason for this is that in addition to lighting, the use of OLEDs is constantly expanding. Now, 80% to 90% of OLED products are used in mobile phone backlight products. In particular, with the upgrading of computers and cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs), the output of OLED products will further increase. In addition, Sharp's LCD TV Aquos, which was launched in November 2009, has also adopted OLED backlight products.

In addition, after purchasing the OLED module, the lighting product can be produced by extremely simple installation of power supply and circuit. Therefore, investment in equipment production is several decades lower than that of fluorescent lamps. In addition, overseas companies such as South Korea and Taiwan are also constantly participating in market competition. Closed competition in the Japanese domestic market may suddenly evolve into international competition. At present, under the ferocity of new manufacturers, large-scale lighting manufacturers have not yet formulated a strategy for the era of OLED lighting. NRI's former former director said: It is widely believed that OLED lighting will become mainstream in the future, but it is very confused about the pace of development. We actually want to do some adequate preparation.

The person in charge of the development of a large-scale manufacturer said that the lighting company's sales executives have shown a sense of respect for OLED lighting when discussing OLED lighting. At the same time, they still hope to continue selling fluorescent lamps. From the time the existing production plans for incandescent lamps and low-efficiency fluorescent lamps to the production of high-efficiency fluorescent lamps have just been implemented, most manufacturers naturally want to continue to produce fluorescent lamps before recovering huge investment in production equipment.

OLED lighting market is increasing gradually

As people's awareness of global warming continues to rise and the price of OLED lamps has fallen sharply, OLED electric lamps have become a new favorite of lighting and have attracted much attention.

If the incandescent lamp is replaced with an OLED lamp, CO2 emission reduction can be achieved by 90%. Mao Yangyi, director of the Japan Earth Environmental Industry Technology Research Institute, said: This is the simplest and most effective energy-saving and emission-reduction technology. According to Toshiba's calculations, if all of Japan's domestic lighting is replaced with OLED lighting, then CO2 will reduce emissions by about 52%. In the wake of Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s announcement of Japan’s 2020 target of 25% reduction in CO2 emissions in 1990, public awareness of OLED lighting will increase.

Many kinds of OLED lamps can be seen in many electronics stores in Japan. In the store, people are constantly asking about the energy saving effect of OLED lamps. According to Deputy Director Hosei Hosoda of Sharp's OLED lighting business promotion center, the demand for energy-saving lamps in electronics stores has far exceeded expectations from the beginning of its listing. Today, there are at least 200,000 factories shipped every month.

The global white OLED lighting market has grown by an average of 37.3% per year on a basis of 134.7 billion yen (about 10 billion yuan) in 2008, and is expected to reach 478.2 billion yen (approximately 35.7 billion yuan) in 2012. Moreover, this value is a fairly conservative estimate. With the further decline in the prices of OLED products and the participation of new manufacturers, the market should be even larger.