Lower Cost of LEDs Reduce Profitability for Manufacturing Landscape

Although residential and commercial industries are widely adopting energy-efficient light emitting diodes (LEDs), the drop in LED prices is driving away manufacturers because of decreased profitability, dramatically dislocating and restructuring the solid-state lighting marketplace, says a new National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report. Since the last Academies report in 2013 that assessed the state of solid-state lighting -- which uses diodes, a semiconductor technology, as an alternative light source to incandescent bulbs -- the annual residential installation of LED bulbs has increased sixfold between 2012 and 2014, from 13 million to 78 million.