Flashlights - market

[Katrin.Glashaus]

Hallo!

In line with my project report for my university I make a market research about LED Drivers in portable lights, especially flashlights.
I hope, that somebody is willing to try to answer me some questions or give me information about the flashlight market:

- facts about the flashlight-market (turn-over per annum, prospects for the future, etc)?

- which companies are the market leaders?

- what's approximately the percentage of flashlights being driven with LED Drivers (buck, boost, buck/boost converters)?

I would be pleased, if you could help me with my task'!

 

[zipplet]

Welcome to CPF! You came to the right place. In my opinion there is no better place to discuss flashlights on the Internet.

It's very hard to come by some of the information you are after, especially sales/cost figures and percentages of various drivers as many of the cheaper manufacturers DONT disclose that information at all.

The major players are names you have probably heard of before and some new names, such as Maglite, Surefire, Pelican, Inova etc. And there are also some chinese names making decent headway in the market such as Fenix, Jetbeam and Ultrafire.

I suggest looking into the larger companies such as Surefire first, maybe you can even contact them and they'll provide some figures. Maybe you can do some research about various lights at places such as the LED museum or flashlightreviews.

Don't forget to look into some of the companies producing the popular LED emitters right now also, that may come in handy. Check out Lumileds (Luxeon), CREE and Seoul. Some of those companies (in particular I seem to remember Lumileds here) do provide a lot of information about use of their emitters in portable lighting which may come in handy.

I'm sure some others here can chime in too!

 

[Kilovolt]

Hi, welcome to CPF. You are undertaking a rather difficult job but I am confident that with some patience you can reach acceptable results.

Several times out of curiosity I asked myself what was the size of this particular market but got nowhere with my speculations. I agree with Zipplet, you should start with the major players and particularly with the LED manufacturers (www.lumileds.com; www.cree.com; www.seoulsemicon.com) and try to work out the figures covering the sales volumes of the LED's. From there it will be not too difficult to get to the value of it.

Good luck and feel free to ask more questions. BTW where are you based?

 

[BB]

You might want to narrow your subject... Like to retail trade (department stores) or by specialty (police equipment stores) etc...

If you have friends that work someplace that sells a wide variety of flashlights (like a major department or sporting goods store)--perhaps you can get some inside information (with permission on how much you can publish vs how much you have to turn from, for example, $$$ to %%% to conceal actual private data that somebody would not want to publish).

Lastly, if you choose retail, you could try and make up a formula that attemps to weigh shelf space, area, and position (eye level for adults vs eye level for kids, etc.) and by quietly taking some pictures (most retailers don't like peopel to take pictures of their displays)--you could map how one chain places certain types of lights vs another chain and speculate that shelf space is based on profit to the store--and you can estimate what makes profit (cheap/expensive, size, function, etc.)--realizing that profit to the store may include manufacturer kickbacks (the legal type), co-advertising deals, etc...

A lot of the data you ask for is going to be hard to get--direct drive vs regulator driven LED's, etc. for the industry at large. Limiting it to a specific slice and to data that you may actually be able to get would probably give you a more interesting paper.

Have fun.
-Bill

I am assuming you are in Munich, Germany or there abouts--If you do the article based on German Retail--it would be interesting to see how that compares with the US (and/or other regions of the world).