The next battlefield in the lighting industry is "selling light" rather than "selling lamps"

To actively cultivate a high-quality lighting consumer market, effectively enhance consumers' scientific understanding of light, and promote the integration of resources and collaborative innovation across the supply chain, the "2026 National Lighting Consumer Market Quality Improvement and Upgrade Lecture Series," jointly hosted by China Association of Lighting Industry（中国照明电器协会） and the Shanghai Lighting Electrical Industry Association, was grandly held at Red Star Macalline Global Home Furnishing No. 1 Store in Shanghai. Leaders from industry associations, technical experts, corporate representatives, and senior designers gathered to engage in in-depth discussions and exchange ideas on core topics such as consumption trends, smart technology, green manufacturing, and design innovation, pooling efforts to drive the upgrade of lighting consumption towards scenario-based, intelligent, and green solutions, drawing a new blueprint for the high-quality development of the lighting industry.

This lecture series was undertaken by the Talent Training Working Committee of China Association of Lighting Industry, China Light Media, and the Industry-Academia-Research Integration Special Committee of the Shanghai Lighting Electrical Industry Association, and received strong support from Red Star Macalline Shanghai Operation and Development Center, Leedarson IoT Technology Co., Ltd., Shenzhen Feiyetai Electronics Co., Ltd., Ningbo International Lighting Exhibition, and other units.

Zhou Jiangang, President of the Shanghai Lighting Electrical Industry Association, stated in his opening remarks that the lighting industry is currently at a critical stage of transition from traditional lighting to intelligent, healthy, and green solutions. Consumers' demands for light quality, light health, and light environment are becoming increasingly personalized and scenario-based. The industry faces multiple challenges, including cultivating a high-quality consumer market, enhancing consumers' scientific understanding of light usage, and promoting collaborative innovation across the supply chain. Based on this, the association, together with various parties, planned this Quality Improvement and Upgrade Lecture Series, hoping to gather top industry wisdom, disseminate advanced concepts of light environment and light value, link resources from production, design, service, and consumption ends, and promote the rapid application of new technologies and products, ultimately meeting the growing demand for beautiful light environments in living spaces and intelligent areas. He expressed hope that this event would serve as a starting point to build industry consensus, pool development strengths, and jointly promote the lighting industry towards a brighter future.

Zhao Lei, Senior Vice President of Red Star Macalline Home Furnishing Group, delivered a speech as the representative of the supporting organization, sharing in detail the new development profile of Red Star Macalline and its strategic layout in the lighting sector. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Red Star Macalline's establishment. After the controlling shareholder C&D Group joined, it injected state-owned management advantages, ample financial support, and global supply chain resources into Red Star Macalline. Under the new "15th Five-Year Plan" strategic planning, the company's positioning has been upgraded to "New Business Operator for Home Living" and "Ecological Service Provider for the Home Industry", and it innovatively proposed the "3+Star Ecosystem" strategy, which insists on the integration of home furnishings, home decoration, and home appliances, serving as mutual entry points, mutual growth drivers, and mutual enablers. Zhao Lei particularly emphasized that in this ecological blueprint, lighting is a core category being firmly explored and prioritized. Light is not only a basic functional accessory but also a key carrier for shaping spatial atmosphere, safeguarding healthy living, and carrying aesthetic value. Red Star Macalline will leverage its core advantages to promote the upgrade of the lighting category, such as deeply integrating lighting into whole-house design through the M+ High-End Design Center, which aggregates resources from over 7,000 designers nationwide; creating immersive light environment showrooms and smart lighting model rooms... He looks forward to deep cooperation with the association and brand partners present, jointly upgrading lighting from an "accessory category" to a value category characterized by "scene core, health necessity, and intelligent leadership".

In the brilliant theme speech session, many industry leaders brought shares that combined frontier nature, practicality, and guidance, providing diverse ideas and valuable experience for industry development.

Hong Bing, Deputy Director of the Talent Training Working Committee of the China Association of Lighting Industry (CALI) and Editor-in-Chief of China Light Net, gave a speech titled "Discussion on Development Opportunities of the Lighting Industry under New Trends", deeply analyzing the current operation status and future development direction of the lighting industry. He pointed out that the current lighting industry is under pressure, the industrial structure changes significantly, and new growth points urgently need to be released, while light health, non-visual applications, intelligence, and green low-carbon sustainability will become the core growth directions of the industry in the future. He focused on analyzing two core growth poles in the future: healthy lighting and zero-carbon lighting. In the field of healthy lighting, he further explained the broad application prospects of scientific mechanisms such as light therapy and regulating circadian rhythm; in the field of zero-carbon lighting, he outlined the complete industrial path from high-efficiency energy-saving products to smart system control, and even participating in carbon trading. Facing challenges, he proposed survival and development suggestions for enterprises: "grasp market direction, pay attention to national policies, understand consumption changes, and embrace media transformation", and specially introduced the Ningbo Lighting Exhibition as an industry wind vane, providing an all-round empowerment platform for the industry by hosting the Global Lighting Appreciation Meeting, overseas buyer matchmaking meetings, and a series of high-end forums.

Dr. Yao Hua, Founder & CEO of Ziguang Technology, brought a deep share blending philosophy and science titled "Three No's and Three Yes's: Building a Light Environment for Physical and Mental Peace". He systematically proposed the "Three No's and Three Yes's" value framework for healthy lighting. The "Three No's" are the bottom line of guarding light: No harm, ensuring photobiological safety, eliminating physiological hazards such as blue light and ultraviolet rays; No irritation, avoiding visual fatigue and neural alertness caused by glare, flicker, and uneven brightness; No interference, respecting human behavior and attention, avoiding light causing circadian rhythm disruption at the wrong time and place. The "Three Yes's" are creating the value of light: Having direction, constructing spatial order through light and guiding visual focus; Having rhythm, letting light synchronize with people's internal biological clock to safeguard physiological health; Having temperature, letting light become a container for emotions, conveying care and peace of mind. Only when the three are interwoven and fused can light be elevated from a "tool to be seen" to a "companion to be perceived", ultimately achieving the unity of physical and mental peace. Dr. Yao Hua also combined actual cases to demonstrate the implementation effects of smart scene lighting in different scenarios, providing a clear path for the industry's healthy lighting practice.

Hong Xiaopeng, Product Director of Leedarson IoT Technology Co., Ltd., shared Leedarson's deep practice in the field of healthy lighting and full-scene solutions under the title "Leedarson Has Good Light, Good Light Understands You Better". Leedarson is a listed enterprise that has ranked first in LED lighting product exports nationwide for 6 consecutive years, and is also the pioneer and leader of eye-care lighting for education in China, having renovated 500,000 classrooms. Based on keen insights into the consumer market, Leedarson successfully migrated its "Light Factor Technology" and clinical eye-care endorsement, cultivated for many years in the field of educational lighting, to home scenarios, developing "Dynamic Light Factors" that can simulate natural light rhythms and preset "Scene Light Recipes" for different spaces such as children's rooms, living rooms, and bedrooms. Through intelligent systems, light can automatically adjust according to the time of day and family activities, from energetic awakening in the morning to soothing sleep aid before bed, providing the whole family with all-day healthy light companionship, truly realizing the brand promise of "Good Light Understands You Better". In the future, Leedarson will adhere to user needs as the core, continuously expand home good light scenarios, and create light environment solutions that are valuable to users.

Lin Jiliang, founder of the Light Formula Research Institute, directly addressed industry pain points in his speech, "From 'Selling Lights' to 'Clarifying Light Value'—What Kind of Light Has a Future in the Era of Lighting Consumption Upgrade." He sharply pointed out that what the industry lacks most is not a dazzling array of "lights," but a profound understanding and effective communication of "light value." Many so-called upgrades are merely changing shapes, adding apps, or adjusting color temperature; essentially, they remain "involution" because consumers do not perceive the value. He emphasized that the core of consumption upgrade is the upgrade of value structure: shifting from purchasing brightness, energy saving, and appearance in the past, to paying for comfort, circadian rhythm, ambiance, and state in the future. Enterprises must completely change their approach: from "selling a light" to "selling a space solution"; from "selling a parameter" to "selling a usage result"; from "selling a product" to "selling a lifestyle experience." Future competition will no longer be a contest of specification sheets, but a reconstruction of user cognition regarding light experience. He believes that "healthy light" should not be just a label, but a human-centric light environment logic that respects human physiological rhythms and adapts to different scenario needs.

Li Yiping, Deputy General Manager of Shenzhen Feiyetai Electronics Co., Ltd., focused on "Research on Product Applications in Segmented Industrial Lighting Scenarios," sharing low-carbon practices in the professional track of industrial lighting. As a national high-tech enterprise with 18 years of deep cultivation in LED industrial lighting, Feiyetai demonstrated its deep customized R&D for extremely complex scenarios such as logistics warehousing, cold chain cold storage, chemical anti-corrosion, and outdoor high-mast lighting. For example, high-luminous-efficacy smart industrial and mining lights reach 200 lm/W, equipped with radar sensors and intelligent control systems, achieving lights-on when people arrive and dimming when they leave, supporting remote control, energy consumption statistics, and fault inspection, with an energy saving rate of 68.8% under a 12-hour work schedule. The company has also created industrial and mining lights capable of withstanding 100°C high temperatures, cold storage dedicated lights for -50°C low temperatures, and IP66 protected sports venue lights, precisely adapting to different segmented scenarios. His sharing confirms that the quality improvement and green development of the lighting industry not only exist on the consumer side, but also contain huge market opportunities and social value in the vast industrial field through high-luminous-efficacy, long-life, and intelligent segmented product solutions.

At the conclusion of this Grand Lecture, Hong Bing, Deputy Director of the Talent Training Working Committee of the China Association of Lighting Industry (CALI), delivered the closing summary. The high-quality development of the lighting industry relies on policy guidance, corporate innovation, supply chain collaboration, and, more importantly, deep insight into and satisfaction of consumer needs. In the future, industry enterprises need to closely follow the development trends of intelligence, health, and greenness, take technological innovation as the core driving force, scenario application as an important carrier, and value transmission as a key grasp, deeply cultivate user needs, strengthen collaborative cooperation, and jointly promote the quality upgrade of the lighting consumption market, allowing more high-quality lighting products and light environment solutions to enter thousands of households and various industries. The successful holding of this event not only injected new ideas and new momentum into the quality upgrade of the lighting consumption market, but also strengthened the willingness for collaborative cooperation among all links of the supply chain, jointly illuminating a brighter and healthier future for the lighting industry.