Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Jan. 12, 2022. Business is moving along this month, including one of the largest in-person electronics exhibitions kicking off the year — CES took over Las Vegas last week. Indeed, show organizers at the Consumer Technology Association stated that indoor and outdoor venue spaces served more than 40,000 attendees, with more than 2300 companies exhibiting.
You may notice our own CES coverage is quite refined compared to years past. There weren’t abundant launches in consumer solid-state lighting (SSL)-based products. The uptick in home health and wellness has apparently taken over, with many digital health monitoring, personal care, and fitness gadgets stealing the spotlight. Indeed, our Mark Halper zeroed in on only two offerings serving very different niches — Targus’ UV-C LED Disinfection Lamp and Savant-owned GE Lighting’s latest smart lamp models.
CES 2022 also appears to celebrate the year of the TV/entertainment display, with many big-screen offerings from TCL, Sony, LG, Hisense, and others touting OLED, QLED, or mini LED technology. Whether or not consumers can really get on board with the prices is another matter. As a related aside, we are searching for a contributor to write an upcoming feature updating the current state of the mini/micro LED market and technology, applications that are growing, and how volume manufacturing challenges are being tackled. So please contact me if you are interested in delivering such an article.
In other show-related news, of course we have an update from Messe Frankfurt on the rescheduling of the Light+Building (L+B) trade fair for a fall 2022 timing. In that same story, we also broke some internal show news with the launch of another regional lighting buyer/specifier event called LightSPEC Midwest, produced by our parent Endeavor Business Media and supported by none other than longtime lighting consultant and Strategies in Light advisor Clifton Stanley Lemon as program director. Lemon will oversee the educational conference programs for both LightSPEC West (Los Angeles) and LightSPEC Midwest (Chicago) taking place this fall.
On to LED business news. Mark also covered recent financial reporting by SGH, which now owns the Cree LED business unit and offered an optimistic view of the prospects ahead for the established LED business. The first-quarter fiscal results ended Nov. 26 show that LED operations had sales over $111M, which SGH CEO Mark Adams hailed as “up substantially” from Q121 when Cree LED was still under the ownership of the former Cree Inc./now Wolfspeed semiconductor organization. Read through Mark’s report to get the full story on manufacturing and product plans from SGH.
Last but certainly not least, we have published a column honoring our retired chief editor Maury Wright, cheering his impact on our team, our audience, and our industry colleagues, while we also welcomed incoming editorial director Wanda Lau this week. Wanda is already knee-deep in gathering intel from the combined LEDs and Smart Buildings Technology group, and we look forward to gaining from her experience in the architectural, lighting, and design fields in serving these audiences.
You’ll find more of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. Please keep in touch about content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Carrie Meadows, (603) 891-9382, [email protected]