Lighting products are essential for both socioeconomic activities and people's daily lives. The industry is transitioning from traditional lighting based on tungsten filament lamps and gas discharge lamps to LED lighting, which is based on semiconductor devices, positioning itself at the forefront of the era of the Internet of Things—progressing from the mobile internet to the interconnectedness of all things. Smart lighting systems, as an important branch of smart home technology [1], have obtained opportunities for vigorous development, ushering in a broad and promising era of smart lighting.
I. Overview of Smart Lighting
Smart lighting refers to a distributed lighting control system composed of communication technology and intelligent information processing of embedded computers, which can achieve functions such as fully automatic dimming, efficient utilization of natural light sources, consistency of illumination, and intelligent transition of lighting scenes. Compared to traditional lighting, smart lighting systems have several features such as automation, scene-based control, voice control, and app operation. Through voice interaction commands or app control, it is possible to adjust lighting brightness, color, and color temperature, and the system can also automatically adjust brightness according to changes in daylight. Smart lighting systems are not solely for illumination but can also interact with other smart devices, adjusting to the corresponding parameters based on pre-set scene modes to create a smart lighting environment that matches the scene.
However, the current state of products in the smart lighting industry, and even the thought processes behind them, are often focused on individual or multiple products or terminals. The smart lighting business model is still in its early stages of terminal deployment. The combination of LEDs with smart systems has led to a diversification of product/solution types, implementation paths, and application scenarios.
II. Current State and Trends of the Global Smart Lighting Industry
1. Current State of the Global Smart Lighting Industry
Humanity has stepped into the era of electrical lighting for over a century, and with the continuous development of science and technology, the lighting field has also gone through four stages of development. Each stage's representative products have their advantages and disadvantages, but the industry overall is developing towards high efficiency, low carbon, and energy-saving environmental protection. Currently, global lighting has entered the LED lighting phase, and the emergence of a large number of new products, new equipment, and new technologies has led smart lighting technology to develop in the direction of system integration.
With technological development, product maturity, active promotion by manufacturers, and widespread awareness of smart lighting concepts, the global smart lighting market has entered a high-speed development phase. According to a new study by Grand View Research, Inc., the global smart lighting market size is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4% from 2021 to 2028, and is expected to reach $46.9 billion by 2028.
2. Trends in the Global Smart Lighting Industry
With the advancement of smart lighting technology and the expansion of smart lighting enterprises' layout, it is expected that the global smart lighting industry will see trends such as brand integration, human-centric smart lighting, personalized smart lighting, and technology convergence.
For specific development trends, see the attached table.
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III. Current State and Trends of the Smart Lighting Industry
1. Steady Growth in the Smart Lighting Market Size
Having a huge lighting market and a strong industrial base for lighting, it is one of the major countries in the world in the production and use of lighting appliances[2]. The smart lighting industry has mainly gone through three stages—energy-saving, automatic control, and intelligent control. Smart lighting is now moving from the automatic control stage to the intelligent control stage, where lighting fixtures automatically control the light through sensors that perceive the environment, and further control of the light and other elements is achieved through an intelligent control system. The smart lighting industry has entered the intelligent control stage.
With the popularization of internet technology and the deepening concept of whole-house intelligence, smart lighting, as an important part of the whole-house intelligence, has received attention from numerous smart manufacturers and has experienced rapid development. In recent years, the market size has been steadily increasing, with intelligent control of lighting products becoming a trend, bringing vast development space and becoming a focus of the entire lighting industry chain.
- Since the 1990s, foreign smart lighting system manufacturers have begun investing and building factories in China, and the market size has been continuously growing, from 7.33 billion yuan in 2015 to 33.7 billion yuan in 2022, with an annual growth rate of around 21.73%.
- In recent years, driven by smart homes, the market size of the smart lighting industry has accelerated its expansion. Capital has been actively deployed in smart lighting, and the annual registration volume of smart lighting-related enterprises has shown an increasing trend.
- With the commercial use of 5G and the layout of new business forms, the smart industry has welcomed good development opportunities, and single smart lighting products have seen explosive growth. As users' demand for smart lighting becomes increasingly strong, the sales of individual smart lighting products will help promote the demand for the renovation of whole-house smart lighting systems, driving the growth of smart lighting product sales through point-to-surface promotion.
2. Residential Smart Lighting Becomes One of the Important Application Areas of Smart Lighting
In recent years, with the maturity of technology and products, as well as the widespread acceptance of related concepts, the application scenarios for smart lighting have become increasingly diverse. At the current stage, there is a growing demand for smart home life, and home smart lighting is a fundamental part of the entire smart home system. Humanized lighting design and energy saving directly affect homeowners' recognition and satisfaction with smart homes. Presently, smart home lighting can essentially achieve functions such as status sensing, automatic decision-making, immediate execution, and real-time analysis. The execution of lighting fixtures is more precise, and users can choose more personalized lighting options.
From the perspective of market demand, the gradual popularization of smart lighting will have a substitution effect on traditional lighting products, thereby stimulating greater consumer potential in a point-to-surface manner and driving the industry chain towards higher-end development.
3. Competitive Status and Development Trend of the Smart Lighting Industry
(1) Upstream Enterprises Accelerate Entry into the Smart Lighting Application Field
Driven by the active guidance of governments and the huge market prospects, the LED chip industry has developed rapidly, attracting numerous investments. The domestication rate of LED chips continues to increase, and except for high-brightness LED chips required for some high-end applications, the quality of domestic chips in other application fields has reached the international advanced level. Technology is gradually driving the development of urban smart lighting, which has a broad perspective. Looking at the layout of upstream enterprises in smart lighting in 2021, it has become necessary to accelerate entry into the field of smart lighting applications. In 2021, several upstream smart lighting enterprises signed cooperation agreements with Opple Lighting, Osram, and others to expand their business scope. Traditional lighting enterprises such as Opple Lighting, Sunshine Lighting, and Foshan Lighting are intensifying their layout in smart lighting, and companies from different fields such as Xiaomi, Huawei, and Meizu are also joining the fray.
(2) Most Midstream and Downstream Enterprises Have Collaborated with Internet Companies
Looking at the layout of midstream and downstream smart lighting brand companies, most choose to cooperate with internet companies to provide more comprehensive smart lighting solutions. Leading enterprise Opple Lighting has cooperated with several internet companies including Huawei, Tuya, Baidu, and others, offering specific solutions such as the Opple Lighting Shanghai office, high-end commercial lighting smart exhibition hall, Tuya Smart Office, etc., thus enhancing its competitiveness in the field of smart lighting.
4. Development Path and Direction of the Intelligent Lighting Industry
Currently, the intelligent lighting industry is facing issues such as a large number of small enterprises and disordered competition, making the competition quite intense. The upstream industry of intelligent lighting is developing rapidly, with increasingly mature processes, constantly improving technology and product quality, a wide range of products, sufficient market supply, and average bargaining power of suppliers. The downstream industry of the intelligent lighting industry is the terminal consumer market such as commercial lighting, office lighting, and home lighting, where consumers have strong bargaining power. As an emerging industry, the intelligent lighting market is not yet formed, there is not a large consumer market, the degree of cognition and popularization is not enough, and it has not yet formed a consumer rigid demand product, with high substitutability. At the same time, in the current smart home lighting market, companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Haier, and Huawei have also entered the smart home lighting market, showing a good development trend.
Intelligent lighting illuminates the future, but the journey is long. The following issues cannot be ignored for future industry development.
First, the degree of industry intelligence is still at a basic stage, with ample room for improvement in the future. The so-called intelligent lighting, whether it is controlled by voice or by mobile phone, is just a change of control method based on the previous switch, and ultimately still requires human active control. Research has shown that the control of lighting quality not only directly affects work efficiency, but also affects physical health and psychological status, and even affects the entire indoor atmosphere and various effects [3]. The future of intelligent lighting should change from perceptible to imperceptible, and be able to judge people's needs more intelligently and automatically on the system, and take the initiative to adjust automatically to meet the user's needs.
Second, the technical specifications tend to be unified, so that we can concentrate on doing big things. The current development of intelligent lighting is blooming, but it has also led to a complicated connection protocol between products, different ways of implementing functions, each brand forming its own, insufficient compatibility with each other, difficulty in data exchange between different products, and difficulty in breaking through the barriers of functional linkage, resulting in fragmented user experience. Intelligent lighting is part of smart homes, and most lighting companies often do not involve other smart home businesses. Promoting the unification of the technical interface of the intelligent lighting industry can ensure the maximum interconnection and intercommunication of the smart home system, thereby promoting the growth and strengthening of the entire industry.
Third, pay attention to the quality issues of the low-end lighting industry. At present, enterprises in the intelligent lighting industry that focus on the domestic market are still sensitive to prices, and the quality level of supplied products varies greatly. The technical entry threshold for the lighting industry is relatively low, product appearance homogeneity is relatively common, function differences are not obvious, consumer perception differences are not high, there are asymmetric information phenomena in the consumption process, and the problems of medium and low-end enterprises still stay on basic product quality issues, forming a big gap with the intelligent development of the industry. Only when the basic quality problems are guaranteed can the industry achieve high-quality development.
IV. Conclusion
In summary, to achieve true systematic intelligent lighting, which encompasses pervasive perception, multi-faceted integration, and interconnectivity, we must undergo a developmental journey from single products to multiple products and then to systems. However, to reach this goal, the lighting industry still has a considerable distance to travel. But with the most complete industrial system in the world today, as well as a leading user market size, and with the advancement of technology and the increasing consumer demand for intelligent, energy-saving, and comfortable lighting, the future potential of this industry will be even greater. There is good reason to believe that intelligent lighting will play a more significant role in the future, bringing more convenience and comfort to people's lives.
