The Urbana-based company Hughey & Phillips LLC is expanding its busniess of replacing incandescent obstruction lighting — the warning lights on towers and buildings with LED lights.
At present, the company has added a 50,000-square-foot building to its campus, giving it more than 70,000 square feet of space. The expansion creates more manufacturing, testing and office space, much of which will be dedicated to new product lines including its Horizon Series of LED lights.
Hughey & Phillips has received Federal Aviation Administration approval for its low-intensity LED light and expects to get FAA approval for a medium-intensity LED light by year-end. Those are two of at least five new products being developed at this time.
The company’s Executive Vice President Richard Finkbine declined to share sales projections but said the new products should add between 25 percent and 30 percent to the top line in 2012.
According to Finkbine , the U.S. obstruction lighting market is mature — new cell phone towers have declined from 12,000 last year to a projected 9,000 this year and 6,600 next year — but there are more than 360,000 existing towers in the U.S. While not all need obstruction lighting, he said that represents a healthy retrofit market.
In addition, Hughey & Phillips purchased the international obstruction-lighting business of Germany’s Honeywell Airport Systems Group, a division of Honeywell International Inc. Finkbine said the sales presence is set up now and the company is building its inventory to sell to the European market.