The LED industry will also usher in the spring of “thousands of purples and thousands of reds”. (1) UV-CLED is expected to enter the explosive growth period from 2017~2018, and the overall global sterilization market output value will reach 500 billion US dollars. At present, the development of LED light sources in the industry is mainly concentrated in the visible light part, including backlight, lighting, etc., but due to the impact of the price war, the price of lighting products emphasizing standardized specifications continues to decline sharply, resulting in a severe impact on the LED industry. As visible LEDs have become the Red Sea market, ultraviolet light (UV LED) and invisible light applications are being carried out one after another, due to the technical entry threshold, many of them are used in industrial or customized products, which will be expected to avoid low unit price competition. Ultraviolet LED is a technology that has only begun to expand in the past 2~3 years, among which, the UV-A band is about 320~400nm, the UV-B band is about 290~320nm, and the UV-C band is 240~290nm.

Ultraviolet light is divided into UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C. The main applications of UVA include in the currency detector, as well as commercial lighting, which can make clothes look whiter, and air purifiers, mainly the principle of photocatalysts, and there are quite a few manufacturers that have launched such products, such as Seoul Semiconductor. The development of higher power products, including light curing, metal coating, wood coating, lithographic printing, exposure machines, etc., all require UV-A in different wavelength bands of more than 1 watt, and the above is the UV-A market. UV-B is used in phototherapy, plant growth, and food preservation. UV-C is widely used, simply put, sterilization and purification, and is widely used in surface sterilization, air, food, and water in our daily life. UV-A and UV-C bands have the greatest market potential, if from the perspective of LED component production technology, the shorter the wavelength is more difficult to do, compared with the current blue LED chip competition with many peers, UVLED crystallization production is difficult, the technical threshold is more than 10 times difficult, especially the short band manufacturers are relatively few, not by throwing money or poaching can be solved. In addition to the chip manufacturing is not easy, the packaging technology is not easy to do, because UVLED is more damaging to the packaging material than the blue LED, especially the greater the absorption of the material by the short wave, it is also easy to destroy the material, so the packaging end also needs to develop technical cooperation. First of all, UV-A LED products are more similar to the current LED lighting, mainly to replace the existing UV products, including power saving, long life and other characteristics are to promote the growth momentum of the replacement, at present, UV-A LED is mainly used in industrial products, such as printing curing, replacing exposure process products, etc. From the perspective of the cost difference of UVLED, because industrial products require thousands of watts ~ tens of thousands of watts of power in the power supply design, and must be used for a long time, UV-ALED will greatly reduce energy consumption, and LED has the characteristics of fast switching, which helps to save power consumption. In addition, due to the high temperature and ozone problems caused by traditional UV lamps, the factory must install an air conditioning system to remove ozone, so when UV-ALED is applied to curing or exposure manufacturing, it not only saves the electricity cost of the lamp, but also the overall environmental and air-conditioning costs. However, LED light sources are single-wavelength and vertical, while traditional UV lamps are multi-wavelength, which also raises the threshold for UV-A LED to enter the market. When UV-A LED is to replace the lamp, because the original printing ink is designed and blended according to multiple wavelengths, the single wavelength must be mixed first, and the light intensity, irradiation distance, uniformity, etc. need to be considered as a whole, the accuracy of irradiation should also be very high, and the luminous angle should be very small, only about 1~6 degrees of parallel light. Therefore, UV-A LED and LED lighting design are completely different, not only testing the ability of packaging factories to cure, light curing market, water treatment. Let’s mention the current power of UV-C LED, which is divided into three categories: less than 5mW, 5-10mW, and 10-30mW. At present, the main products on the market are 3-5mW, which still account for a considerable proportion of market sales from 2017 to 2018, but with the improvement of manufacturers’ technology and production capacity, in 2019, we also believe that the next main sales points will be 5-10mW and 10-30mW products. In 2016, the performance of each manufacturer in the revenue survey or output value survey was mainly UV-A, and the top three were Nichia, Nitride Semiconductors, and Seoul Viosys. In 2017, Korean manufacturers performed better in UV-A and UV-C, with the top three being Seoul Viosys, LG Innotek, and Nitride Semiconductors. At the same time, LEDinside focuses on the development of major UV-C manufacturers, and LG Innotek claims that their products can reach 100mW, and will soon launch 150mW products, and we also expect more and more manufacturers to develop high-power products to create more opportunities for the market. The second is that Seoul Viosys is also very active, they keep coming out of the package, and they are also coming out of the finished product. There are also some products that have been actively developed by LED manufacturers recently, including Epistar, Lextar, and San’an, all of which launched 275 to 285nm UV-C LED products in 2018. Kilding has also launched 265nm UV-C products, and Nichia will soon launch 280nm UV-C LED products. There are also some manufacturers in Europe and the United States that are developing, and they are also continuing to pay attention. We see more and more manufacturers entering this market, and this market will move towards polarized development, some manufacturers will enter the consumer market, and some manufacturers will enter the high-end commercial and industrial markets. If UV-C products need to continue to develop, its market potential will be controlled by three key factors, the first is whether consumers can agree with the characteristics of this product combined with ultraviolet sterilization, the second is whether it is necessary to use ultraviolet sterilization to bring fast and convenient effects, and the third is whether the current product cost performance will be accepted by the market. Recently, the relevant market research agencies estimate that the UVLED market size (die plus packaging) will be expected to expand from 90 million US dollars in 2014 to 600 million US dollars in 2019, among them, UV-A LED has been affected by the price decline in recent years, the growth rate is relatively fast, and the market demand in 2014~2018 has begun to take off significantly, and the application is in the industrial use grade, the price volatility is low, and UV-C LED is expected to enter the explosive growth period from 2019~2020.