Chinese LED Lighting Package Manufacturers on the Rise, Analyzes TrendForce

Chinese LED package manufacturers sales performance in 2013 was mediocre, the LED package market value was up slightly by 16 percent due to plunging prices, according to the latest “2014 Chinese Package Industry Market Report” by LEDinside, a research division of TrendForce. As can be seen from each application market, display-use LED component market demands clearly declined as a result of easing market growth and falling prices. In addition, backlight-use LED component, which currently have a saturated market demand, will have limited growth as technology improvements bring down usage volume. Chinese package manufacturers growth was mainly driven by lighting-use LED components. In 2013, lighting-use LED component market share surpassed 40 percent making it the sector with the largest market demand in the Chinese LED package industry. 

Graph 1: Distribution of Chinese LED package component application in 2013

Source: LEDinside

Manufacturers with their main business in lighting-use LED components such as Honglitronic, ChangFang Light, MLS Lighting and others, showed a clear growth in their lighting-use LED component business in 2013. Last year, Honglitronic and ChangFang Light’s revenue increased 39 percent and 41 percent respectively. Refond Optoelectronics, who focuses on mid to large sized backlight LED market, saw an increase of 84 percent in lighting-use LED sales performance. Small size backlight manufacturer Jufei Optoelectronics’ lighting-use LED component revenue also grew 84 percent. 

Rapid upstream chip industry development has been the propeller behind the fast emerging Chinese package manufacturers, due to low-priced LED chips and geographical advantages where local LED package manufacturers have the advantage of being close to local resources. Ample manufacturing resources and factory distribution gives Chinese downstream lighting industry an advantage in cost and manufacturing. During the first half of 2014, San’an Optoelectronics (San’an Opto), HC SemiTek, and Tongfang utilization rates reached full capacity of 100 percent. ElecTech also saw an increase and estimates remaining MOCVD will be put into production during the second half of 2014. Over the next few years, San’an Opto, HC SemiTek and other large Chinese chip manufacturers will continue to expand production capacity. Among them, San’an Opto plans to introduce another 200 MOCVD sets by 2018, expanding production capacity mainly for lighting applications.