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TECHNOLOGY / LED 121


The European Lighting Industry - a dying has been or the leading innovators of the future. The EU believes the latter... do you? Our LED expert Dr Geoff Archenhold reports.


EUROPE NEEDS TO INVEST TO COMPETE


Welcome to a new dawn and a new year! 2012 is set to be a big turning point in the lighting industry with key events taking place that demonstrate on a world stage the best that Solid State Lighting can offer: the London Olympics, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and of course the world’s largest lighting show - Light & Building.


Unfortunately, it’s not all good news for the lighting industry as some of the goliaths of the past 100 years struggle with both the new economic financial crisis, shifting global economical power to Asian based businesses and the rapidly developing SSL technology that has drastically changed business models of old. This week we see


the third successive profits warning from currently the world’s largest lighting com- pany, Philips, which can only be bad news for a strong European lighting industry. Over the last year I have been working to provide support and evidence to the Photonics Unit of the European Commis- sion located in Brussels which outlines why we still have an active European lighting industry that is not only worth acknowledg- ing but actually worth actively supporting over the next decade. Of course we know Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean governments are heavily investing in their lighting supply chain to make themselves number one in the new SSL dominated light- ing world, but that shouldn’t mean Europe throwing in the towel and letting others dominate the market. In fact its true that China is the second largest GDP country and set to be the world’s largest economy (baring civil disruption or mass economic meltdown) by 2050 but that also means their consumers will want to buy high qual- ity, stylish lighting designs that offer an experience well beyond basic LED offerings in the future.


I firmly believed that Europe is still number one in terms of lighting and can retain this position in the next hundred years by not only innovating but exploiting the innova- tion. The latter point is a skill we seemed to have lost at a European level for over a generation as we seem not to be able to exploit our innovation like cousins in the US or friends in China, Japan and Korean. The great news is that lighting designers from the UK are high sought after and regarded and this is where the change can happen. It is the leaders of the lighting design commu- nity that can show the way forward for the lighting supply chain by designing innovative lighting schemes that push the boundaries


The European lighting industry needs to invest in order to compete with Asian and US counterparts. Photo: OSRAM


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