Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Mar. 25, 2020. Here’s hoping all of you are as well as possible and that your friends, family, and colleagues are also well. Business times are tough in LEDs and solid-state lighting (SSL) and life and health issues may be tougher.
It was almost exactly one month ago when it became clear that the coronavirus would have a major impact on our technology sectors. On Monday, Feb. 24, in our Lighting for Health and Wellbeing Newsletter we reported that Signify had announced its intention not to exhibit at Light + Building (L+B) and later that day L+B postponed the event to the fall. Of course, many other events have followed suit.
Still, we were surprised to learn this week that Signify had decided not to participate in the rescheduled L+B on Sept. 27–Oct. 2. Now make no mistake, I’m not suggesting that all will be well with coronavirus in late September. I’d certainly hope that would be the case, but there are no guarantees. And Signify could have waited on announcing its decision.
But Signify only partially blamed coronavirus for the decision. The company had planned and executed on product development schedules for spring events. The company simply has to now take all of that information to the community of product developers and lighting designers/specifiers in a different manner.
If you read our newsletters and my columns on a regular basis, you will know that I regularly promote our industry events — most of which I’m actively involved in. I generally, however, am not directly involved in selling ads, sponsorships, lead-generation programs, or similar items. Still, I would say to all of you, we do have the ability to help manufacturers inform their potential customers about new technologies and we can help developers and specifiers concurrently with vehicles such as webcasts. Indeed, our webcasts draw very nice attendance figures. So don’t forget us.
As for other news, there was yet another surprising merger & acquisition (M&A) story that broke this week. Ecosense has acquired Soraa, its products, and all of its intellectual property (IP). Still, Soraa was not your grandfathers’ replacement lamp company. Soraa was a startup pureplay in LED technology with a huge investment in IP. Ecosense has landed entry into the replacement lamp market with high-quality products but also a potentially draining proprietary LED program.
We also had a couple of packaged LED stories break recently. Samsung has finally commercialized its LED components designed for lighting for health and wellbeing applications. We covered the technology concepts last year in which the company could enhance the blue energy produced by an LED for day use. And now Samsung can deplete the blue energy for the night.
That same LED story also covers new ultraviolet (UV) LEDs from Crystal IS in the UV-C band that can kill pathogens. The company has increased output power and reduced the cost of the components.
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]