Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for June 9, 2021. The merger and acquisition scene continues to simmer in LEDs and solid-state lighting (SSL). And frankly it can be difficult to make sense of some times.
Our Mark Halper continues to follow the venture now called ams Osram and wrote about the major deal where Acuity brands just acquired what had been the Osram Digital Systems business in North America. Mark offered up some thoughts as to why the deal made sense for Acuity. I am still struggling to understand the move by Acuity. What they primarily acquired is a high-end driver manufacturer with a leadership position in moving towards standards-based connectivity in drivers.
Acuity, of course, already has eldoLED in its stable — also a high-end driver manufacturer that had adopted the same standards-based connectivity, namely the DALI Alliance D4i intra-luminaire interface. I suppose that eldoLED is much stronger in Europe than in the US, and Acuity bought the North American business of a global player. But the deal may have been more about keeping the Osram unit away from competitors than about a need on Acuity’s part.
In that same article about the acquisition, Mark also covered the recent Acuity acquisition of AI (artificial intelligence) specialist Rockpile and the addition of Rockpile co-founders Peter Han and Dinesh Narayanan to the Acuity executive team. Acuity CEO Neil Ashe has been very busy since taking the helm in January 2020.
We have a couple of things I want to mention relative to Strategies in Light planned virtually for Aug. 24–25. Our Carrie Meadows posted a poll on our blog page last Friday focused on what some call integrative lighting or lighting for health and wellbeing. A Strategies in Light preview article prompted Carrie’s poll. Please take a couple of minutes and respond.
After that post on the poll, we also posted the article by Strategies in Light co-chair Clifton Stanley Lemon. He advocates for the term integrative lighting as more appropriate than human-centric lighting. I can see the fault in the moniker human-centric lighting. But so long as people have an understanding of what a label implies, I’m not generally for coming up with new descriptors. Or maybe I’m just lazy. As a writer, I have to type in the newest moniker and then explain it was formerly called something else.
We have had a lot of life science on the site in past days, some of which we highlighted in Monday’s HortiCann newsletter. Since then, we also posted a story about the use of ultraviolet (UV) energy in enhancing pig farrowing operations. Seoul Viosys says that its UV-B-band LEDs can increase vitamin D synthesis in pre-weaned piglets.
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) 208-9442, [email protected]