Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Feb. 26, 2020. When does a week turn up with virtually no news to report, yet includes perhaps the most stunning news to hit the LED and solid-state lighting (SSL) sectors in years? The easy guess is this week and would be correct. And it all centers around the coronavirus Covid-19. And I’ll repeat what I’ve written before about the business impacts of Covid-19. First and foremost, it’s far more important that China and the rest of the world find a path through the malady than it is for the stock market to recover or the SSL supply chain to normalize.
Still, we have to report the news in our sectors. And Monday brought the shocking news that Light + Building (L+B) in Frankfurt would be cancelled or more correctly postponed until September. The organizers made that decision shortly after Signify announced it would not attend.
We’ve yet to learn when L+B will be rescheduled beyond the mid-to-late September range. There is no easy choice. Many of the support workers move around Europe working on major trade fairs. And there are conflicts that will ripple through our LED and SSL sectors in any case.
The much-smaller but compelling LED Professional Symposium is set for Sept. 22–24 in Bregenz, Austria. There is LED China in Shanghai the prior week. The Professional Lighting Design Convention is being held in New York for the first time Oct. 8 –10. There’s the Street and Area Lighting Conference just after. And of course, there are other conflicting events across Asia. And society must grasp control of Covid-19 for any of these industry events to matter.
Our LED and SSL sectors had appeared just on a potential upslope to recovery, and now will face more challenges. Indeed, I had written a column for our March issue that’s now available in HTML format in addition to on our digital magazine platform. I argued that many opportunities in SSL exist, and I still believe that to be the case. If you want to peruse the entire March issue, subscribe and get seamless access.
I’d also like to request your cooperation one more time on a reader survey we have in the field. Again, I apologize for inundating you with too many surveys in the past year. But this State of the Industry survey will offer a direct return from you. I am going to report on the survey in our next issue. And I think that information will be important to each and every one of you in terms of the direction of the industry. So if you haven’t taken this survey, please follow this link.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. Please note my relatively new email address below. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]