Recently, Taiwan's Photonics Industry and Technology Development Association (PIDA), has released a report on LED industry scale in 2011. Taiwan remains world's biggest in LED industry scale in 2011, despite lower-than-expected market growth.
As the eurozone's debt problems dragged down demand, the output value of the global LED market grew by only 2.6 percent to US$16.6 billion (NT$502.48 billion) this year from US$16.1 billion in 2010.
In terms of regional performance, Taiwan still topped the market with a total output value of US$4.54 billion in 2011 -- including those of the upstream epitaxial wafers -- although the figure declined 0.4 percent from last year's US$4.56 billion.
South Korea ranked third behind Taiwan and Japan with output values of US$3.35 billion this year, representing an increase of nearly 5 percent from last year.
Some South Korean companies have launched low-priced products to tap into the lighting market but they still need to purchase LED components from Taiwan to save costs because of their limited scale of production.
For Europe, LED output value plunged 7.3 percent from US$1.74 billion in 2010 to US$1.61 in 2011 due to the impact of the European debt crisis and fierce competition.
While, China is considered as the highest growth among all regions with its LED output value surged 26 percent year-on-year from 2010, thanks to local government support.