被LED灯吸引的工业巨头
Industrial giants caught in LED headlights（451 words）

By Chris Bryant in Frankfurt

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Shoppers at the Carrefour hypermarket in Lille no longer have to ask for help to find items on special offer — instead they can navigate to them using their smartphone.

Philips, the Dutch technology conglomerate, has installed 800 light-emitting diode fixtures at the 7,800 square metre store that can send a location signal to a customer’s phone using light invisible to the human eyes.

“With the right sensors installed, an LED light-fitting could become the best GPS ever by directing customers or visitors to where they want to go” says Gaia Nocchi, director at Frost & Sullivan, the research and consulting firm.

Lighting is starting to become part of the “internet of things” — where different devices are all connected on telecoms networks — but for incumbent manufacturers this rapid technological shift is causing huge upheaval.

Industrial giants Philips, Siemens and General Electric for decades enjoyed an oligopoly in the hitherto slow-moving lighting market, which James Stettler, an analyst at Barclays, compares with a “licence to print money”, partly because people have to regularly replace their bulbs.

Now LEDs are fast displacing traditional light sources such as incandescent, halogen and fluorescent bulbs, catalysed partly by double-digit annual price declines in components.

Government regulations also have supported the growth of LEDs because of their energy efficiency. They produce light using semiconductors — whereas traditional light bulbs rely on filaments — and therefore consume less electricity.

LEDs also last much longer than old-style bulbs and are far more sophisticated. For example, the new 68-storey International Youth Culture Centre in Nanjing, China, has 700,000 LED lights capable of illuminating the building façade in different colours at night.

Frost & Sullivan estimates the global LED lighting market grew 35 per cent to $32.3bn last year, and it is forecast to more than double to $70bn by 2019. LED as a proportion of the total lighting market is set to near 50 per cent by the end of 2015 and reach 84 per cent by 2020.

The incumbents saw the tech revolution coming and are now among the biggest players, but the rapid growth in LEDs has attracted new low-cost competitors, particularly from Asia.

The incumbents are responding to these challenges in different ways, but broadly speaking they are restructuring legacy, high-volume lighting units and regearing their business models towards “smart” and “connected lighting”.

“In 10 years there might not be a single light bulb left. If your core competence isn’t needed any more, then you need to adapt — the challenge is to move from being a general lighting company to a solution provider,” says Ms Nocchi.