Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for May 29, 2020. I know I should not assume that any of you share my interests. I do hope you continue to read the newsletter and I try to keep this column mostly business and technology focused. But give the state of affairs in society, I find it hard to stay on the rails of LEDs and solid-state lighting (SSL).
So, I must ask... Has anyone seen one of the Bundesliga German football games where the stadiums are playing recorded crowd noise and cheers? It’s strange enough to watch a sporting event with no fans in the stands. I think it may be stranger to hear previously-recorded chants and cheers. Alas, I adopted Schalke as my Bundesliga team and they have gone winless since the resumption of play. And ironically I probably like the missing Schalke fans more than the team.
Being that we are facing up to the end of May, our Carrie Meadows went back and surveyed the most popular stories for the month based on article page views. You can see the top four below. Business stories dominated the list. Osram was the focus of two of the top stories including the story on its quarterly results and strategies the company has adopted to minimize the impact of the pandemic.
We have two GE-related stories in the newsletter, albeit coming from different branches of what is an expanding limb structure of past, current (pun intended), and future businesses. Just Wednesday, GE announced that it had agreed to sell its GE Lighting consumer lamps business to Savant Systems. GE had offered that business for sale going back nearly two years. Savant is a company focused on smart home technologies. GE Lighting does have some smart LED lamps, but they are not a large part of the businesses’ portfolio.
On another limb of that tree, GE Current recently sold off its CityIQ platform and that was another of our top stories for May. As we reported previously, CityIQ was not a great match for the mainstream GE Current lighting business. It was just less than a year ago when I got a first-hand look at the internal workings of the GE Current outdoor lighting operation.
We will welcome the arrival of June next week. I will mark off yet another week of the new normal. There is one person in my universe who has enjoyed the past few months — well, she thinks she is a person. My golden retriever, Calypso, loves going to have takeout lunch in the car a couple of times a week, and she has gotten more park trips than ever. Hopefully, the summer brings good news relative to COVID-19.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. 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]