How to catch up with the hot spots in the lighting industry?

Foreword:

Talking about the lighting industry, I still like the consistent thinking in the past. I think: Any lighting practitioner, such as from top to bottom, from small to large to observe, understand, analyze, predict, judge the industry’s past, present, two or three years later, and even the next few years, maybe There will be different opinions.

This article will be divided into upper, middle and lower three articles from theindustry hotspots, industry essence, business environment, market changes, business pain points, business logic, opportunity risks and other aspects of the popular language. This article introduces some industry hotspots in the past two years. Looking at the leopard in the tube, throwing bricks to attract jade. (This article has a total of 6223 words, 11 pictures, expected to read 16 minutes)

First, the lighting industry hotspots in the past two years
1
Industry environment: Facing the new normal, keeping the normal state

In recent years, the international trade has been affected by the Sino-US trade war, resulting in exchange rate changes and export tax rebate rate adjustments, resulting in a global economic downturn. The lighting industry is no exception. The price of overseas manufacturing orders has fallen, and it has rapidly shifted to Southeast Asia, India, Vietnam, etc., and international trade has entered a systolic period.

The domestic macroeconomic growth rate has declined, real estate has ushered in the consolidation period, the building materials industry is fiercely competitive, e-commerce development and professional market upgrades have broken the fixed order, consumer demand has been upgraded and iterated, and the diversification of lighting product consumption scenes has brought shocks, and various new types have emerged. Consumer hotspots, consumer brand and quality awareness are increasing.

2
Smart lighting: as always

The intensity of intelligent lighting has lasted for a long time, but it is still in its infancy, and intelligent lighting is an inevitable trend in the future development, no doubt. From the industrial properties of lighting equipment, it is classified into electric terminals, dimming and coloring, APP, AI, smart lighting, and connected lighting. It is for the convenience of users’ lives, and can be accepted by the consumer market. The key is also whether it is more convenient and simplified. How to reduce the complexity of products to the extent that the public can use them as a whole is a major obstacle to intelligent promotion. Artificial intelligence technology For some enterprises in the associated industry chain, its hardware and software is no longer a problem. What we can do is how to adapt and match the rigid needs of consumers .

▲  Image originated from the network

The intelligent optimization design of lighting fixtures should further enhance energy conservation. No matter what products are considered, it is easy to debug and operate. It is compatible with existing lighting systems and open, secure and stable network communication, and convenient connection to mainstream IoT platforms. Reducing the complexity and cost of the connection, saving the installation time and cost for the user, and maintaining the operating cost later is the king.

Some people have lighting, lighting terminal equipment has been focused from pure energy-saving benefits to the collection and use of big data, is becoming an information collection point and data node for indoor and outdoor use, will have the opportunity to collect people-oriented big data.From the characteristics of hardware and software technology, combined with the application characteristics of lighting terminal equipment, using technology applications such as sensing, positioning, navigation, communication, etc., big data analysis, business purpose application and social life research on application scenarios and space. In the future, it will play an active role in security, energy reduction, easy maintenance, remote management, smart space, real-time monitoring, control, response to traffic, weather, security, and events.

3
City night lighting: lighting needs to be integrated with humanities, environment and architecture

The exposure of urban lighting has been constantly rising to new heights in recent years, and major cities, including small and medium-sized cities, are paying more and more attention to urban night lighting. “Thousands of cities”, “light pollution”, “television”, “destruction of architectural beauty”, “design homogenization”, “protecting the dark sky”, social commentary is mixed.

▲ Image originated from the network

The application of night lighting has entered various scenes of the city, bringing different social and economic benefits. The integration of various industrial ideas leads to the concepts of night travel economy, cultural creation lighting, and cultural travel lighting. Through lighting linkages, lighting shows, lighting theme festivals, lighting and beautiful performances, urban marketing is used to drive the tourism economy and create city business cards.

Early lighting was the main purpose of lighting up the city at night, reflected in road lighting and architectural floodlighting. In the middle and late stage, building and public landscapes are gradually used as carriers to realize different architectural rendering effects. At the same time, with the excellent light color characteristics of LEDs, various media information is carried and data transmission is realized. Whether in the city as a whole or in a single lighting design, the city ​​night lighting should express the carrier, not the lighting itself.

▲ Bund Night Scene Photography:

Light directly affects people living in urban environments, and returning to the lighting connected with humanities, the environment, and architecture is truly valuable night lights. Urban lighting is a systematic project that requires scientific planning and control, and it must reflect the functional value, rather than simply “lighting up” and “moving”.

4
Lighting style: the era of backlighting, unlimited possibilities of light design

What are the popularity of many lighters every year? Where is the wind vane?From functional lighting to decorative lighting, lighters are tangled every year. Nordic minimalist, old and new Chinese, light luxury, nine squares, no main lights, linear lighting, smart street lights…

▲ Image originated from the network

The small, easy-to-control, adjustable, safe, low-voltage LED light source has decided its unique design features: light can be designed multiple times, the shape can be freely changed, thus bringing infinite possibilities for lighting space application design. Rich light color, real-time intelligent electronic product attributes. The mainstream style of lamps is no longer entangled in the simple replacement of light sources, and upgraded to new light-effect new LED integrated energy-saving lamps.

From application to product, from demand to design, lighters should not refrain from thinking about the traditional appearance of lamps. The upgrade of LED lamps should be an artistic and visual value exploration. The luminaire is the carrier of light, and the change of the light transcends the object itself, which is related to the human vision and feeling. Light is used as a decorative material for space, and the integration of lamps and decoration is a trend. At present, the boundary between the lamp and the space environment tends to be blurred, and high-level construction techniques and light applications can effectively reflect any point of the line surface.

Whether indoor or outdoor, functional lighting can achieve the light and shadow art and boundaries through the reasonable structure and optical design of LED lamps. According to the company’s product owners, we should pay close attention to “light application optimization” as the product development and upgrade points , and stir up some concepts such as light luxury lamps, linear lighting, magnetic track lights, etc. In the era of “user-centered” mobile Internet, The meaning is not great.

5
All categories and specialization: product planning needs attention

Two years ago, the product line planning of the industry’s high-quality brand manufacturers and small and medium-sized manufacturers will be opposite. The application of the products will be further subdivided, and professional luminaire manufacturing artisans and merchants focusing on sub-applications will continue to emerge in various segments. Well-known brand manufacturers will continue to expand their product lines and increase customer promotion in sub-application areas. Small and beautiful, independent creative design capabilities, deep research on the application of pain points, artisan SMEs or pseudo-technical small and micro enterprises will reduce the product line, occupying sub-application areas with higher quality and cheaper products and fast and high-quality service. Manufacturers and merchants with inferior and low-priced currency products will become more and more difficult to survive.

▲ Image originated from the network

The whole category is suitable for the first-class popular brand enterprises with brand pull , which is built on the comprehensive strength of brand, capital, resources and team, and can build or rebuild the marketable channel through its own platform. Professional lighting brands to do all kinds of categories can easily lead to missing products and channels, spread misplacement failure, brand reputation decline.

The lighting industry is a fairly segmented industry of application categories that require a variety of different products to match space applications. Some home lighting second and third-line brands simply extend the product line of household lighting and can not be called the whole category. The whole category corresponds to the needs of different application spaces, and it is necessary to match different channel channels. This has essential differences.

6
Spot platform: technology empowerment has a chance

The current spot platform is keen on art decoration lighting products, but the spot manufacturing concept of using art lamps as industrial products to produce , can influence the upstream supply chain to produce long-term benign health, and measure the weight of products between quality standardization and cost performance. Its product concept, quality standards, after-sales service, operation management, etc. all take time to test.

▲ Image originated from the network

It is not yet difficult for the lighting industry spot platform to establish brand awareness at the end user level, and it does not have the basis for draining terminal consumers to the platform. At present, most of the platforms in the industry still have to rely on channel distributors, and they cannot give consumers too many indicators. The e-commerce platform has the common feature of taking prices and discounts to attract attention, and it is easy to mislead the price behavior habits of channel merchants. Based on the commercial nature and habits of the industrial products and lighting industry, B-end merchants are more willing to cooperate in private circles, and usually do not use a single open procurement channel to meet daily business needs.It is easy to see that there is a congenital deficiency in the scale development of the lighting industry platform. Small industry vertical platforms without standard qualitative products are difficult to create success, and industry attention is also insufficient.

The spot and platform of the lighting industry itself is a contradiction. If the current platform wants to be successful, it needs to invest heavily in assets. The reality is that merchants do not dare to invest heavily in assets and do not want to stock up, so the market has emerged a variety of spot platforms.The platform itself is not stocked, and ultimately the supplier is stocking, it is just a product sales and marketing big data management platform.

In the era of new consumption, user consumption is personalized, quality, and diversified. Customization is common, and delivery is often rigid. Users require lighters to respond quickly and deliver services quickly. In the era of low profit, the cost pressure is large, the traditional lighting manufacturing industry needs to reduce costs and improve efficiency, strictly control the production and sales situation, and the lighting industry product update iteration is too fast, which is easy to cause inventory depreciation. The product delivery capability is a key consideration for KA customers such as engineering projects and collection, and is also an important factor for the brand to survive and develop in the market. Insufficient stocking, lack of safety stock management, and slow shipping cycle will inevitably bring many adverse effects to the business. Eventually, the merchants lost customers, lost projects, and often, the cooperation of manufacturers naturally broke down.

The first-line merchants in the market generally lack professional and systematic lighting knowledge. The promotion of manufacturers and professional designers alone is far from meeting the huge domestic lighting application market and consumer demand. The lighting industry needs to have a professional lighting knowledge department to popularize the training and sharing platform to do market guidance, technology empowerment, and promote industry product and service upgrades.

7
Post-price war era: the left is king

Faced with channel differentiation and information fragmentation, in recent years, some professional lighting markets have been delisted or closed due to the impact of the big environment, and the vacancy rate is as high as 40%.The changes in the market naturally affect the production enterprises. The days of the second and third-line brands in the lighting industry are generally not good, and the transformation and upgrading of products and channels is difficult. Some enterprises, especially the lighting enterprises of household products, have lost 30% or even more than half of their turnover. Even if the light enterprise’s revenue grows slightly, it faces the pain and embarrassment of the decline in gross profit. The market has entered the inventory phase. A considerable number of lighting companies have begun to adopt price wars in order to compete for market traffic and seize or retain the market. Price wars are common, but lighters who fight price wars have to control the breakeven point in sales growth.

▲ Image originated from the network

Judging from the law of the market, the price of each lamp dealer in the channel is stifled, and the market share is occupied by products of inferior and low price. The situation of price war will not exist for a long time, andmarket competition will return to products and services. . The detonation of the price war has accelerated the regulation of the market, and the impact on the lighting industry is good in the medium and long term.

However, the price wars of the internal parts and finished products market of the main lighting fixture manufacturing base will slam the product upgrade and innovation, trigger the problem of imitating the wind and the inferior products, and squeeze the profit margin of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises. Whether the lamp dealer can persist in the mood of the craftsman, do a good job in products and services, survive the winter, wait for the spring, is a big test.

Pure e-commerce supply This type of manufacturing company will be more and more difficult because of the long-term price war trap. Small and medium-sized manufacturing companies that have no technology, no brand, and no advantage will probably be the first to be sacrificed.

From an objective point of view, the tide of bankruptcy caused by the price war is reasonable, which is also an integral part of the profound changes in the lighting industry. What should be seen by the lamp dealers is that thecurrent high probability of industry mergers and acquisitions and integration is not the behavior of a single enterprise, but the result of the linkage of industry, capital and market, and the normal development law of the lighting industry becoming mature. This will be far-reaching for the next lighting industry, and it will be good for the lighting industry in the medium to long term.

8
New terminal retail: diversified needs, skills are far more important than models

In the face of the new normal, the business of the lighting industry is getting harder and harder, the price war is hidden, and the consumer demand is diversified and high demand. We see that the current industry channel business thinking is still old and difficult to change. Merchants generally have no product line planning, lack of integrity; unwilling to promote innovation, sales are still too valued; business ideas are lagging behind, relying too much on products or brands; lack of necessary sensitivity and awareness of cross-border competition; Integration is overwhelming or indifferent and so on.Manufacturer brands have a high degree of overlap in the channel path, and various types of “image stores” are everywhere.

▲ Image originated from the network

In the era of mobile Internet , the operation of traditional terminals is getting harder and harder. There are more and more new retail scenes centered on experience and efficiency. Including factory purchases, cross-industry alliances, bargaining, etc., but the transformational confusion of the entity side still exists. In the past two years, we can see the hard survival of the physical store of the lighting, and also see the turn of the lighting industry e-commerce. When all competition is transferred to the line, traffic becomes scarce and expensive, and e-commerce profits are insufficient to support its operating costs. The physical terminal retail needs to reposition the business thinking. In the era of the whole installation, the lighting design is the market weapon of the physical offline terminal. The lighting design effectively links the relationship between the lamps, the light and the space, and is also the “ceiling” of the online retail service.

9
Capital theory: bottlenecks frequently

In recent years, the capital market of the lighting industry has developed rapidly. Capitalism has been widely spread among mainstream lighting brand enterprises. Many companies hope to finance their own business problems through listing, mergers and acquisitions, and venture capital. In just a few years, there were more than 30 listed companies on the main board of the lighting industry. However, there are too many companies blindly investing after listing, some have changed their face, some have suffered heavy losses, and of course there have been rapid development. After the company is listed, it is necessary to catch the main business.

10
Human factors and health lighting: people-oriented

Light has direct or indirect effects on human important hormones, which in turn have a number of effects, the effects of light on the human body, the so-called HCL human-induced lighting. Blue light hazards can cause visual fatigue and maculopathy. But blue light is not all harmful light, what is really harmful is short-wave blue light. Whether the short-wave blue light will definitely cause damage to the human eye is related to the intensity of the illumination and the irradiation time. When the illumination reaches a certain level and lasts for more than two hours, it may cause damage to the retina.

The LED light source has the characteristics of small size, easy control, and adjustable, and the spectrum can be customized to provide unlimited opportunities for healthy light quality lighting. Under the topics and concepts of “blue light hazard”, “full spectrum” and “sunlight color temperature”, health lighting needs to emphasize the use of professional and reasonable secondary and tertiary optical design to match the appropriate light source and electrical module. The essence of healthy lighting. The lighting industry will enter the “light health” era of light environment design parameters related to human safety and comfort .

People-oriented light research, lighting is not only science, but also a life experience, high-quality light environment is conducive to human health and safety, LED era is easier to customize and control light, by studying the relationship between people and light, Continue to upgrade the quality of light.

Summary: A Summary of Hot Spots in the Post-Lighting Era

The rapid rise of new fields such as LED technology, intellectual control, and human factors engineering, and the rapid decline of traditional lighting represent the arrival of the post-illumination era of “LED lighting has become the mainstream of the lighting industry” . However, the old light business thinks solidified and still uses the old ideas to operate.

The old product thinking that continues the characteristics of traditional lamps, there is not much innovation change on the product, and it is impossible to effectively subvert the defects of traditional lamps through new light source and new technology. The miniaturization of lamps, the customization of functional parameters, the individualization of styles, and the combination of familyization are the inevitable design trends in the future.

▲ Image originated from the network

The old sales strategies of price wars, explosions, channel presses, and full-market retail stores remain the same. The channel channels of the brand are highly coincident and inactive. Upstream prices continued to fall, and finished product costs fell rapidly. Insufficient value-added lighting products, the value of lighting can not be reflected, can only be achieved through market share expansion, ease the pressure on performance.

The price war also triggered the reconstruction of the entire industry product line. At present, the entire industrial chain is still very fragmented and difficult to change in the long run. It is impossible to occupy a large scale on the whole line of products. From the objective factors of this industry, it is very challenging to achieve an absolute lead. If the lighting industry is to develop well, it needs to have an ingenuity of light merchants, which needs to be subdivided and specialized. Then, in the future or in the future, the industrial manufacturing enterprises will be more and more subdivided and specialized. On the middle reaches of the LED business or industry affiliates, or exit, or integrated lighting applications product companies, directly into the machine lighting failure of the finished product rate is too large.

At present, there are general deficiencies in the innovation of lamp dealers, lack of creative ability, fear of innovation failure, insufficient sensitivity to external new technologies, and insufficient application (human factors, human intelligence, natural light). Compared with other LED applications, new applications such as Mini/MicroLED display, plant lighting, and automotive LED lights are basically independent of general lighting.

Like other industries, the lighting industry is also affected by the changes in thinking brought about by the Internet platform, causing confusion in the rules, vertical extension of the lighting industry chain, horizontal expansion, and the overall category and omnichannel popularity . The head effect of the source area is accelerating, resources are integrated, and a closed-loop ecological chain is established. The head enterprises need to lead the entire industry in innovation in design and manufacturing, and set an example. The differentiation of demand in the application market has led to a real market segment. It is no longer a simple channel dealer area and sales channel division, but a product application solution segmentation, and more specialized, small and beautiful light merchants.

The essence of the lighting industry is light, mining and innovation needs from human factors and health. People-oriented lighting application research includes: lighting quality, interactive experience, health, materials, design, lighting environment, human psychology and so on. From the aspects of eye protection, physiological cycle rhythm, environmental atmosphere, spectrum, user interaction, installation methods, etc., market innovation will be triggered. Pay attention to the combination of light, according to the change of different character scene space and mode switching, it is the correct way to adjust the light environment more conveniently through various input devices and improve the quality of various space activities. Adding to the lighting industry, rather than making the additions to the industry. The future space lighting should be an ideal environment to return to the original, return to the essence and the initial heart, and to be in harmony with the humanities, art and ecology, and to live in harmony with the society.

Today I shared with you the first part of the lighting industry hotspots , the next one will continue to analyze the nature and mission of the lighting industry, the macro environment of the lighting industry, etc., please look forward to!

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