An old head on young shoulders

Sharp Microelectronics might be a relative newcomer to the lighting market but Uwe Hock argues that it brings a vast amount of optoelectronic knowledge to the table. Ben Cronin speaks to the manager of the company’s lighting business in Europe about LCD backlighting and the optimum price points for retrofit bulbs

What are the advantages and disadvantages of entering an unfamiliar market for a company that is more famous for producing solar panels and televisions?

Sharp is actually not a newcomer to the LED market. We have worked for almost 40 years in the LED market. There’s a rich focus on consumer-type applications and we have a lot of base technology for things such as mobile phones and optoelectronics in general. If you look at the core technologies Sharp is actually working from, they are all based on optoelectronics, whether that is LCD and solar, or LEDs and things like lasers.

Okay, but the applications are different…

That’s correct. And this actually goes back to 2006 when we decided to engage in two new markets for LED and these were defined as LCD LED backlighting and LEDs for general lighting applications. So we basically decided to engage in these two markets to benefit from products potentially being re-used in both applications. If you do a type of area backlighting on an LCD panel, you could use the same technology for lighting. We are one of the few companies that do this type of big panel production.

And how has the market responded to you?

Our market share is mainly growing because of our focus on providing components for LED retrofit bulbs. Our Zenigata series is designed for a certain type of homogenous light spread for applications such as LED bulbs. That market is steadily growing in recent months and will grow further. It’s a huge market and Sharp, as one of the first players, has quite a good market share. Most of the factories for this type of product are in China.

But it’s still very expensive to buy an LED retrofit bulb. What do you think the tipping point will be?

I think the general expectation in the market is that it will explode when the pricing reaches a ten to 15 currency rate. By that I mean ten to 15 dollars, ten to 15 pounds, ten to 15 euros. That would be what we and a lot of market analysts foresee as a price break where consumers will buy it. That would be the type of price range for a 40W equivalent, not for the 100 lumen or 200 lumen lamp, but a very low lumen output.

Is that just a psychological figure in people’s minds?

If you’re talking about psychological figures, everybody wants to have a one-digit number, that’s what I would call a psychological figure. But if you do the kind of analysis to try and calculate the benefits one-to-one, you can see an LED is better in terms of dimming; it has a longer lifetime and it doesn’t get as warm as other products. It doesn’t have any of the toxic issues of CFL-type products. The only disadvantage today is that maybe you don’t get enough lumens in some applications and maybe it’s too expensive. For the lumen, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to get that corrected for a 60 or a 75W product in terms of pricing. That still needs to be solved. I think you’ll start to see 40W bulbs in the £10-15 price range over the next six to 12 months. And then it will take off.

Your typical customers in the UK are presumably different. What is your route to market in the UK and Europe?

In the UK, actually, if you talk about components, we would not talk about bulbs at all. What we would focus on is luminaires, so our typical lighting customers in general parts of Europe are luminaire manufacturers where we are able to offer some technical solutions and advantages with our arrays and the types of products we produce. I think our strength is in making very good quality, high-volume and consistent products that are also very small. We are experts in miniaturisation. If the chip is small, the designer has more freedom on the optical reflector and the optical design.

“We are experts in miniaturisation. If the chip is small, the designer has more freedom on the optical reflector and the optical design.”

And do you have any ambitions to be a solutions provider?

If you talk about Sharp as a company, we do have end products in Japan but we don’t have any end products in Europe. We are not able to disclose when we would offer, or even if we would offer, any sort of end product at all. We can offer, if you wish, semi-finished OEM-type solutions but if you’re talking semi-finished,semi-finished barely exists in LED today. Maybe the first company who had something was Philips Lumileds, or Philips in general, with the Fortimo solution. This is what I would call a semi-finished type solution. Or an Osram PrevaLED, this sort of light engine is something that we are looking at.

We are a full member of Zhaga and we are obviously investigating when would be the right time to launch a product but we are not seeing this as a big market in Europe yet. And it’s really a question of matching the speed of the market rather than that we alone would push it. Do we have an intention to become a solutions provider? I would have to ask what you mean by the word ‘solution’. Semi-finished? Maybe. Finished products, it’s not yet clear.

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