By MICHELLE HSU Since around the beginning of this year, consumers may have noticed reports in newspapers and magazines about a “daylight tubular device” (DTD) which, as its name implies, works on the principle of efficiently collecting natural light in a dome, introducing it into a tube, and enhancing the lighting through special devices in the tube to bring highly efficient natural illuminat...

By MICHELLE HSU Wood is one of the most ancient of materials. But until recently, it was rarely used in lighting products. Today's new generation of energy-efficient lighting seems especially incongruent with wood due to its high-tech nature. In fact, though, wood has been making a splash in new lighting products displayed at creative woodworking exhibitions in Taiwan. With ingenuity, light...

By MICHELLE HSU The outlook for the international lighting market is bright, and Taiwanese manufacturers are well positioned to take advantage of the rosy prospects. Many of the island's lighting companies with their sights set on the mainland Chinese market, such as the LED lighting manufacturers Everlight, Epistar, Lextar, Genesis Photonics, Edison, and LedLink Optics, displayed how the plan...

By KEN LIU In July this year the Taiwanese LED heavyweight Lextar Electronics Corp. won an International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) in the United States for its intelligent "PANDORA"pendant. Michael Yang, manager and chief designer in the company’s lighting product design dept., says the award once again shows that his firm’s innovative designs meet the need of end users. The PANDOR...

By KEN LIU A total of 10,097 buyers from 112 countries and regions eagerly shopped for energy-saving lighting products, especially LED lamps, that were displayed by 1,081 exhibitors from 14 countries and regions at the Hong Kong International Lighting Fair (Spring Edition) 2014, which was held on Apr. 6-9 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. The number of exhibitors was up...

By MICHELLE HSU The increasingly close ties between lighting industries across the Taiwan Strait were in the spotlight at the Taipei International Lighting Show (TILS) held in late March this year. The show featured a special cross-strait lighting industry forum on life applications of emerging smart lighting technology, hosted by Steven Lin, chairman of the Taiwan Lighting Fixture Export Asso...

Chairman Robert Yeh of LED packager Everlight Electronics believes that the team made up of his company and chipmaker Episar Corp. is likely to dethrone Nichia Corp. soon as the world’s No.1 LED maker by revenue. Currently, the two companies are the world’s No.1 LED packager and chipmaker, respectively, by production capacity. Last year their combined revenue of NT$47 billion (US$1.5 billion a...

Revenues for this January showed unevenness among Taiwan’s LED makers, with some gaining and others losing from the previous month. Companies that posted gains include Lextar Electronics Corp., Unity Opto Technology Co., Ltd., Genesis Photonics Inc., Edison Opto Corp., and Formosa Epitaxy Inc. (FOREPI), with underperformers being Epistar Corp. and Everlight Electronics Co., Ltd. Gaine...

By MICHELLE HSU From typhoons and floods to global warming, Mother Nature is making her ire over ecological destruction felt with increasing intensity. Countries around the world are heeding the message with redoubled attention to environmental protection, increasingly in the form of green building design. The green movement has spread to a range of product categories that now balance the pul...

Robert Yeh, chairman of LED maker Everlight Electronic Co., Ltd., announced at the company’s Jan. 19 yearend banquet that its earnings for 2014 will be better than 2013’s estimate of NT$3.5 per share while projecting the company’s revenue for 2014 to rise 25% year on year. According to the LED packager's executives, major growth drivers for the company’s 2014 revenue are LED lighting, LED inf...