LED Plant Lighting Industry Development

Plant lighting is the main component of agricultural lighting, is a kind of engineering measures to regulate the light environment of facility plants, in order to promote the growth and development of plants, yield and quality. Plant lighting is mainly used in facility plant production (in artificial light plant factories and horticultural facilities such as greenhouses), and to a lesser extent, it is used in open field cultivation to supplement light, overcome low-light and low-light adversity or implement photoperiod regulation to obtain maximum plant production benefits. Plant lighting is a cross-border scientific and technological field, involving two disciplines of facility horticulture engineering and lighting engineering, as a cross-cutting new industry, so the speed and quality of industrial development depends on the degree of cross-disciplinary integration.

With the progress and rise of LED lighting technology, influenced by the development of facility horticulture industry in Holland and Japan, the diversity and advancement of China's facility horticulture is experiencing a leapfrog development, with the incremental development of the scale of continuous greenhouse, and the application of artificial light plant factories continues to rise. In the last 10 years, along with the LED plant lighting special light source industry and facility horticulture industry explosive development, the formation of the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei as the centre of the plant lighting R & D and industrial base, plant lighting products and applications year by year, has become China's LED lighting industry profitability of the new growth point. At present, including the upstream LED chip, midstream packaging, power supply and lamps and lanterns enterprises have hundreds of enterprises throughout the country more than 20 provinces.

In the past five years, with the international legalisation or licensing of cannabis cultivation and use, the upgrading of the facility horticulture industry and the rising demand for high value-added horticultural products, plant lighting has ushered in the development of a new opportunity, plant lighting R & D and industrial development has entered a new period of development. According to the research report of Technavio, a global research organisation, the global plant grow light market will reach US$3 billion in 2020, and the global market will grow at a growth rate of 11.7% from 2016 to 2020. At the 26th Guangzhou International Lighting Exhibition, according to incomplete statistics, there are dozens of enterprises involved in plant lighting, and the development momentum can be seen.

Plant lighting has been the hotspot for R&D and industrial growth in the field of LED lighting in the past 10 years. Generally speaking, LED plant lighting has passed the primary stage of technology research and development and industry shaping, and the industry has passed the growth period and gradually entered the maturity period. At present, the development of plant lighting industry is facing development opportunities, there are also some challenges. 

The challenges facing the plant lighting industry include the following levels. First of all, the plant lighting market still needs to be cultivated, market segments and product cost-effective need to be improved; secondly, plant lighting leading enterprises are rare, well-known products are only a few; industry self-confidence, user visibility, the combination of industry, academia and research and the use of market segments need to be improved; finally, the domestic market development and utilization of the major issues, especially in China's current plant lighting production enterprise clusters, research institution clusters and facility gardening industry clusters geographic location. Finally, the development and utilisation of the domestic market is a major issue, especially in the current Chinese plant lighting production enterprise cluster, scientific research institution cluster and facility horticulture industry cluster, the geographical separation of serious problems, the three together and cohesion to be strengthened.

Looking forward to the next 10 years, plant lighting technology research and development and industrial application scale will make significant progress, the formation of a more complete product system and market system, focusing on the launch of plant factories with cannabis growth lamps, pasture growth lamps, seedling lamps, strawberry lamps and medicinal plant growth lamps, etc., as well as greenhouse vegetables, fruit trees, such as special filler lamps, the market prospects are very promising. In addition, LED will orderly replace HPS, domestic facilities horticulture production plant lighting lamps and lanterns coverage will reach more than 60%, LED product penetration rate will reach more than 60%, 1 times higher than the current. Industry, plant lighting industry will appear about 10 leading enterprises, the annual market size will reach more than 5 billion yuan, the scale of exports year by year, become a plant light production and use of big countries and even strong countries.

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