Let's answer some basic questions about the size of the market.
There have been several comments on my recent blog asking questions that I would generically categorize as "fundamentals of the lighting market." These are questions such as "What is the largest market segment for lighting?" and "How often do the fluorescent tubes in offices get replaced?" While it's not possible in a short format such as this to survey the lighting market comprehensively, I want at least to tackle a few of these basic questions.
Bulbs
So, first to the largest market segment. The first thing to note about lighting is that it is huge. Everyone knows that cellphones are a large market: Apple and Samsung sell vast numbers of iPhones and Notes. But the number of lights sold each year is 10 times more than the number of cellphones. So even though I'm going to say that certain market segments in lighting are "small," for almost all other industries the total available market (TAM) would be considered enormous, enough to be worth dedicating a substantial fraction of a company's resources pursuing.
Several years ago, before CFLs started becoming a serious force in the market, the world-wide TAM for light bulbs was about 12 billion units per year. Out of those units about two-thirds are "medium screw-base," which means they screw into an Edison socket. Of those, approximately two-thirds are 60W or less. That is, A19 (and A55/60) bulbs at 25, 40, and 60W sell about 6,000,000,000 per year!
Why so many? In the first place, there are a huge number of sockets, something like 20 billion. Incandescent bulbs are traditionally rated to last 1,000 hours (although newer ones are up to 2,000). A thousand hours of continuous would be only six weeks. But many of those sockets aren't on that much. The general idea in the industry is that the average bulb runs maybe three hours per day, so 1,000 hours is just about one year replacement time -- and that's how you get to 6 billion units annual sales.
Tubes
Now we can think about the "smaller" market segments. There are something like 2 billion fluorescent tubes sold per year. They are rated to last 10,000 or even 20,000 hours (depending on the cost). That's one to two years of continuous use. Now the industry handbook recommends that all the tubes in a building be changed out once a year, whether they are still working or not. The reason is that labor to bring a ladder out and change a tube is way more expensive than the savings from getting an extra month of service life from a tube.
But we all know that no one does that. You wait until the tube goes out, and then you call maintenance to come change the light, which they do usually within a few weeks. How many tubes have gone out over your head that you can remember? Darn few. So the reality is that, although the number of sockets is huge (there are a lot of offices in the world), tubes are just a midsized market. And of course, T8s and their ballasts are fairly high-efficacy, stretching out the time to ROI for LED tubes.
I've answered (partially) two of the questions about the market. But there's a great deal more known about it. If you have specific questions, maybe I can write another blog to answer them.
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