Durability, safety, efficiency and even RoHS-compliance (Restriction of Hazardous Substance-compliance) today have become top concerns in products supplied by premise-lighting equipment manufacturers in Taiwan and mainland China.

To achieve these goals, most producers have installed efficient manufacturing equipment and examination instruments.

Taiwanese and mainland Chinese manufacturers supply a wide range of lighting products including ballasts, day-lighting products, lamp holders, light sources, control components and control devices.

Compared with household lighting, premise-lighting equipment is more valuable because of the higher technical hurdles. Over the past few years, many lighting manufacturers in Taiwan and the mainland have diversified into production of premise-lighting equipment to boost earnings.

Taiwanese and mainland Chinese suppliers are also working hard to differentiate themselves from competitors by introducing high-end products like devices for high-tech lighting sources such as light-emitting diode (LED) lamps.

Like manufacturers of other lighting products in Taiwan, Taiwanese premise-lighting suppliers have mostly moved production to the mainland to pare production costs.

T6 Specialist for Premises
In this field, Taiwan Light House Concern Group has mostly focused on the market of T6 lighting equipment for premise uses. "We are dedicated to differentiating our products from major lamp makers worldwide and making most of the shared specifications of T8 and T6 equipment, " stresses company vice chairman Sunny Kuo.

According to Kuo, world leading lamp makers including Philips and Osram are promoting T5 fluorescent lamp, which is one inch shorter than T6 lamp. But T6 is exactly as long as T8 (though thinner), which is the standard lamp used in Taiwan and most Asian markets. "The T6 will help us gain ground in the Asian home markets, since consumers can install the bulbs in their current T8 lighting fixtures, " Kuo explains.

The vice chairman stresses that T6 is much more power efficient than the T8 because of its thin design. Also, the company' s T6 is easier on the eyes than rival T6 products, due to its faster blinking frequency--48 kilohertz per second. Kuo says his company' s T6 products are also safe and environmentally friendly.

One green touch in the company' s products is the use of solid-state mercury blocks inside lamp. "Solid mercury does not penetrate into the soil or other things like the liquid mercury widely used in many fluorescent lamps to amplify light, " Kuo reports. He adds that compared with liquid-state mercury solid-state mercury uses 20% less of the toxic substance.

The company' s unique electronic ballast comes with a short-circuit protection design, which automatically shuts off power when detecting short circuit and improper lamp installation. "The design prevents fires, " Kuo says. Also, the patented ballast cuts off electrical power when it finds that the lamp' s light efficiency is falling below set standards, preventing inefficient power consumption.

Kuo claims that his company' s ballast can reduce power usage by 40% compared to competing products. "Although our ballast costs twice as much as average products, the power savings make it a worthy product, " he says.

Featuring a voltage-stabilizing design, the ballast is an ideal lighting electronic component for regions with unstable electrical power supply. According to Kuo, his company' s ballast requires barely one ampere of power to activate a T6 lamp.

T6 lamps with the company' s ballast have a maximum life span of 16, 000 hours, according to Kuo. "Average fluorescent lamps have a maximum life span of only 6, 000 hours, " he says.

The company' s lighting equipment, Kuo boasts, costs less than rival products in terms of overall lighting effect. "Under the same circumstances, if a 333-square-meter room needs 100 sets of fluorescent lamps to get ideal brightness, the same room can be lit optimally with only 80 sets of our lamps, " he reports.

The company' s secret weapon is a research and development team of 30-some engineers led by a former employee of power-supply maker Delta Electronics Inc. of Taiwan.

Taiwan Light House now supplies 10W, 20W, 30W and 40W lamps, which are made at its factory in mainland China. The factory is designed to have a maximum output of 80 million fluorescent tubes a year. "It is running only at 20% capacity, " says Kuo, stressing that room for the capacity utilization rate to grow remains ample. His company makes ballasts in Taiwan for fear that they could be copied if they were made in the mainland.

The company markets its products through affiliate Sheng Kuwn Technology Co., Ltd., which was opened in March this year. Although the company has shipped its products to Thailand, Taiwan currently remains its major market. In Taiwan, it has focused on the replacement market, which Kuo calculates accounts for 80% of Taiwan' s total lighting market. Its products have been adopted by many banks and a well-known hardware retail chain on the island.

Over the past few years, the firm has contracted 48 stores throughout the island to sell its products. By the end of this year, it will boost the number of stores to 350. Kuo estimates Taiwan' s lighting market to soar to NT$58 billion (US$1.8 billion) this year from last year' s NT$54 billion (US$1.6 billion). Counting on the domestic market alone, the company, Kuo reports, has seen revenue double in each of the past few years. "This shows that there remains plenty of room for revenue growth, " he concludes.

Halogen Lighting
Huizhou Fusheng Lighting & Electric Co., Ltd. Specializes in some 10 models of halogen lamp, including the explosion-proof G9 lamps. Europe is the major export outlet for the company' s G9 lamps whereas its PAR lamps mostly go to the United States. Its PAR lamps are popular in the U.S. for their quality, which rivals that of Philips. The company' s G8 lamps, also hot selling products in the U.S., are noted for their long life span, good shock resistance and consistent quality.

Company general manager Liu Zairong boasts that her company' s products are among the highest quality lighting products made in the mainland.

Liu opened her business in 2001 after working as an R&D engineer at many lighting companies since 1993, when she graduated from a local university. Last year, her company registered exports totaling RMB20 million (US$2.4 million at US$1:RMB8.2). "We project our exports to grow at double pace this and next few years, " she says. Liu bases her optimistic forecast on her company' s dedication to middle-range and high-end products awarded with CE and TUV approvals. They are exported to Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United States.

Liu stresses that her company usually prioritizes quality over quantity. "So, we' ve not lost any customer since our inception, " she claims. Behind the company' s quality accomplishment is a quality-control squad composed of industry veterans. The company' s outstanding quality performance has attracted growing orders from customers. To handle the order surge, the company will construct a new factory on a 20, 000-square-meter parcel it recently acquired. Liu says her company' s output will surge 10-fold once the new factory begins production.

Liu points out that her industry is currently confronted by two major difficulties--soaring production costs and R&D shortage. "Soaring labor, land and material costs will hamstring small-sized manufacturers that need to compete on price. The other difficulty is that high-end manufacturers will be soon trapped by low profit if they fail to put more effort into R&D work, " she says. Fearing that it would be caught by such a trap, Liu' s company is dedicated to constant R&D aimed at continually elevating product value.

Bright Future in Dimmers
Founded in 1988, Wang House Technology Co., Ltd. Is upgrading from a producer of low-end transformers to a high-end supplier by introducing drivers and drivers bundled with dimmers for light-emitting diode (LED) lamps.

"Competition in the transformer market is already overcrowded, especially since mainland Chinese suppliers jumped in the game, " comments Connie Wang, Wang House' s vice president.

Wang' s company began developing LED products around two years ago. "The major threshold is control software for these devices, " she says. To overcome the difficulty, Wang House has hired many well-trained software engineers, including Raymond Lin, a master graduate of Canadian nationality.

Lin has helped Wang House develop an LED driver built with dimming function. According to Lin, there are only a handful of lighting-electronics manufacturers making the products. "The difficulty is that light color tends to go wrong if the dimming software is not good enough, " he says. He reports that his team has fixed the problem. Lin and his team used the device to boot up a 120-lumen LED lamp with well-tuned color. His company has yet to commercialize the electronic component.

LED lamp drivers are the company' s major LED product. Wang House aims to generate 15% to 20% of its revenue from this product by the end of this year, up from last year' s 10%.

In addition to LED-lamp devices, Wang House will put more effort into the development of electronic ballasts for high intensity discharge (HID) lamps this year. "We will focus on technology for low-power models in the initial stage, " says Wang.

As soon as Wang' s company decided to develop LED lamp devices around three years ago, her company started recruiting foreign R&D engineers. Among them was Erik Ruigrok, a specialist from the Netherlands. "Recruiting engineers can help us upgrade our technology and develop overseas markets, " she stresses. The company' s Taiwan headquarters is equipped with a team of five R&D specialists with either doctorate or master degrees, according to Wang.

The company also has worked with government-backed technology institutes and academic organizations in Taiwan, like National Chiao Tung University, on leading-edge lighting technologies.

Wang House has moved production to mainland China and retained its marketing, R&D and procurement operations at its headquarters in Chungli in northern Taiwan. Wang says her company' s mainland Chinese branch completed a new factory last year to produce the company' s new products. Her company moved production to the mainland around eight years ago to trim production costs.

After long dependence on American and Canadian markets, the company began tapping the European market a few years ago. "With the help of new products, good quality and diligent marketing efforts and cooperative distributors, we' ve seen sales grow 20% to 50% each of the past four years, " Wang claims.

Her company markets 60% of its products under the "Wang House" brand, which she says is recognized as a symbol of quality among customers.

Wang House is also a RoHS-aware company, which Wang says began demanding suppliers around three or four years ago to process its products with lead-free methods. All the chips in the company' s products are made in Europe and the United States, assuring high quality.