LEELEDS, a member of Leedarson Lighting made a splendid appearance with its smart lighting solution at the 2011 Hong Kong International Lighting Fair. The solution enabled consumers to completely control their lighting with the ability to remotely turn lights on and off, and dim them in a wireless way. It turned the smart lighting system into a smart energy management solution for residential or commercial lighting thus drew wide attention from the industry and media. LEDinside therefore made an exclusive interview with Mr. Xu Hong, Deputy General Manager of LEELEDS, who gave a detailed introduction to their smart lighting solution, technical background, fast and steady development experiences and shared his unique insight on the development of the LED photobiological safety and lifespan standards

LEELEDS’ Smart Lighting Solution

According to Mr. Xu, LED light source is reputed as the most ideal light source humankind has ever found for its energy saving, environment-friendliness and zero pollution. LEELEDS has also conducted large-scale tests in this respect and found out that the traditional incandescent light can only transfer 10% of the electricity into lighting and waste the rest in the form of heat. For CFL, this rate is raised to 20% while LED lighting products can reach as high as 25% to 40%. When it comes to the smart control system, the energy efficiency is further increased by 30%. Confident about the broad prospects of the smart lighting control market, LEELEDS has expanded the household lighting system product line into the commercial and outdoor lighting systems and become committed to the smart lighting control system.
 
In order to provide customers with the high-quality and low-price product and systematic solutions, LEELEDS has cooperated with industry leading enterprises such as NXP and GreenWave Reality. With the technical guarantee and support of chips from PHILIPS LUMILEDS, smart control system provided by GreenWave Reality, components supplied by NXP, LEELEDS provides the comprehensive solution by integrating the smart lighting technologies of NXP and GreenWave Reality into its CFL, LED bulbs and luminaire product lines and enables users to wirelessly control lighting, i.e., remotely turn lights on and off, and dim them.

The smart lighting control system by LEELEDS not only realizes full customization but also transcend the lighting system level into the energy management system, becoming a low-price, high-quality and affordable product. Meanwhile, the solution can also optimize global smart grids through integration with the smart grid technology, which is being widely developed by many countries and areas,

Goal: Become the Best Partner of Oversea Private Labels and Establish Own Brand at Home

Mr. Xu said that now that the global economy has hit bottom again with weakening market demand, consumers are keeping tighter control of their pocket money in the hope of buying better for less. Yet LEELEDS always holds the belief that the success of the customer is our success. Satisfying the customer is a significant enterprise strategy for sustainable development. Only in this way can we win high customer loyalty and stable customer groups. In light of different customer demands in domestic and oversea markets, LEELEDs customized its market positioning into two different ones as the starting point for the next two years of LEELEDS’ total development. 

In the oversea market, LEELEDS will strive to become the best partner of private labels and join hands with well-known global retailers like IKEA to develop the new generation lighting products and realize low cost and high performance of the product so as to help customers to win the market and consumers.

In 2010, the global sales of Leedarson Lighting were 200,000,000 energy-saving lights (including CFL, LED lights and luminaire), of which the mainland market accounted for 18%. Given the mainland market is mixed up with good and bad LED lights，LEELEDS expects to sustain its development, establish its own brand and work hard to become one of the best lighting management solution suppliers.

First ZHAGA Member in Mainland China: Actively Promote the LED Standard Development and Improvement

As for LED related lighting standards, Mr. Xu believed that there is already unified standard for LED light source as the International Electrotechnical Commission has made definite stipulations on the size, voltage, current, safety, optical distribution, color temperature of the light source.

                             8.5W A60 Omni-directional LED Bulbs                                                           6" LED Downlight

Currently, the disputes over the LED lighting standards are mainly focused on two aspects: one is the LED lighting product lifespan standards, the other is the LED lighting product photobiological safety standards.

In the lifespan of LED lighting product, theoretical data shows that the use of LED lighting product can last more than 40,000 hours. In fact, due to the influences of factors like the operating voltage and ambient temperature, the actual use life may be far lower than the theoretical result. The actual use life of lighting products and how to realize the balance between the technical indicators and the consumer market demand are important references for developing this standard.

In the LED photobiological safety, since white LED spectrum is caused by the blue light excitation of the phosphor, blue leakage does do harm to human eyes especially child eyes. Currently, LED lighting products are required to reach the zero hazard level for human eyes by governments around the world. However, the existing problem is that so far there is no international standard organization has distinctively defined the LED blue light photobiological hazard to human eyes. Besides, there are no clear distinctions between zero hazard, some hazard and severe hazard level. Mr. Xu further added that when developing LED photobiological safety standards, it is essential prerequisite to define the blue leakage hazard to human eyes. 

In the meantime, LEELEDS has joined China Association of Lighting Industry, Zhaga to actively participate the related LED standard development. It irregularly publishes its opinions at seminars held by industry associations and provides corresponding testing data as the analytic base for standard development. Besides, LEELEDS is the first lighting enterprise to become a member of the Zhaga Consortium in mainland China. Zhaga is a consortium aiming to provide standard draft proposal to IEC. An industry standard can only come out after consensus reached among the organization and approved by the IEC to which it is submitted. In Zhaga, membership is entitled to a generalized system of preferences. Though members have to sign an agreement to give up related patent applications on optical, electrical, mechanical and thermal interfaces, they can share resources in terms of corresponding advanced technologies so as to promote the forming of unified industry standards. 

Development Experiences

At last, when making conclusions about the fast development of the late starting LEELEDs, Mr. Xu remarked, “the key is to find the right person, do the right thing, and keep the right rhythm of actions. “

According to Mr. Xu, as an emerging industry, LED industry relatively lacks outstanding talents. However, human resource is the most important factor to the enterprise development. Therefore it is necessary for an enterprise to attach great importance to the personnel selection so as to search for the talents interested in the career in this industry. He said that he was lucky to find a group of talents and organize such an excellent team, establishing a good foundation for the fast and steady development of LEELEDS.

Many choices are available for LED investment, like the chip, materials, package or application. It is greatly on the basis of its clear market positioning and accurate customer positioning that LEELEDS has chosen to specialize in smart lighting solutions and general lighting market.

Mr. Xu believed that the design and control of the rhythm of development is very important for a company. Going too fast often results in the waste of resources and even an early business failure in the industry. However, seeking only steadiness but ignoring the speed will also delay even bog down the development. Therefore the company should closely follow the industrial trends and balance its development against the mainstream trends.