Accelerating the Development of LED National Standards Requires Serious Consideration from All Sectors

　　Standards have always been one of the hot topics in the LED industry, and the lack of standards and lagging standards have always been bottlenecks in the development of the LED industry. In 2010, national and industry standards related to LED were intensively introduced, but whether these standards can truly become guidelines for guiding enterprise production still needs time to test.At the current stage, how to formulate China's LED national standards, industry standards, local standards, and enterprise standards requires serious consideration from all sectors, and a coordinated and mutually complementary standard system should be established to regulate products and market behavior.

　　From the perspective of industry standards and market supervision, the formulation of standards and regulations is undoubtedly very important for the healthy and orderly development of the industry. Standards themselves can have multiple levels: national standards should pay attention to international integration; local standards should not only conform to the basic norms of national standards, but also regulate corresponding requirements according to local road and climate characteristics, as a supplement to national standards. Therefore, continuously discovering problems through practice, constantly improving, and continuously refining standards are of great significance for promoting and improving national standards. From another perspective, currently, some enterprises believe that LED still lacks standards, which is also a misconception. In the lighting field, the standardization systems for lighting, lamps, construction projects, etc. are complete. In these fields, the main problem at present is that there are standards that are not implemented and laws that are not followed. Therefore, on the one hand, we must strengthen the formulation of LED-related standards, and on the other hand, we must also publicize and implement existing standards.

　　However, it cannot be denied that the introduction of LED lighting-related standards in China is indeed relatively slow, and the reasons are multifaceted. First, LED lighting involves multiple fields and industries. LED belongs to the traditional electronic component industry, but also belongs to the optical and optoelectronic industries. When it comes to lighting, LED also involves the lighting electrical industry, the light source industry, etc. From the perspective of standard formulation, because LED spans multiple industries, in the power and responsibility attribution of formulating standards, multi-party communication and coordination are needed. Second, because LED lighting is a new technology, the professional committees of traditional industries do not know much about it, and China lacks enterprises with a sufficiently large scale and sufficient influence on the industry, which adds some extra difficulty to the formulation of standards. Third, LED technology is still not a mature technology, its technology has not been finalized, and the technology develops and changes rapidly, which also brings certain difficulties to the formulation of standards. Fourth, the intensity of publicity and implementation is not enough.

　　In this regard, LED standard-setting may be considered from the following aspects:

　　First, the establishment of a standard system should fully leverage the collaborative cooperation among government, industry, academia and research institutions, give play to the advantages of each link in the industrial chain, mobilize multiple advantageous units to tackle key issues in the form of project tasks, conduct thorough discussions and experiments, and draw fully on relevant international standards, so as to establish a standard system suited to the development characteristics of China's industry. Standard-setting is meant to safeguard the industry, and should not become a threshold set by certain enterprises for their commercial interests.

　　Second, standards must be built upon relatively mature products or technologies. Some technologies and products have not yet been fully finalized; if standards are set prematurely, future product development and technological progress will be restricted. Therefore, basic norms and standards such as those on terminology and testing methods may be considered, so as to regulate the market and put an end to disorderly competition.

　　Third, the standard system includes national standards, local standards and enterprise standards, which complement one another.

　　The continuous introduction of local standards has laid a solid foundation for the establishment of national standards. Enterprise standards and local standards are important components of the national standards system. Take enterprise standards as an example: standards related to the specific products of a particular enterprise are the concrete refinement and embodiment of national and local standards. Therefore, the formulation of enterprise and local standards should be more detailed, and enterprise standards should generally be higher than national standards. Fourth, after standards are issued, especially mandatory standards, market regulatory authorities should promptly establish systems for supervision, market access, certification, testing, etc., while strengthening the publicity and implementation of the standards.

With the deepening of economic globalization and the increasingly fierce international market competition, the role and status of standards have become increasingly prominent. Standards competition has become a deeper, higher-level and more influential form of competition, following product competition and brand competition. For the LED industry, the current top priority is to introduce and issue national standards as soon as possible, implement standards strategies, promote technological progress in enterprises, enhance their competitiveness, and drive the healthy and orderly development of the LED industry.

(Editor: zl)