***This is all just my opinion, impression, and DO NOT use it for investment purposes!***
If you take a look around, you will learn that CREE is one of the largest blue, aqua, green LED suppliers out there.
There has been a tremendous amount of competition in the small LED die market, especially with a variety of asian low end die makers entering into the market, plus dramatic price reductions, as 5mm and other SMT blue, green, aqua, and white LEDs enter into the dime a piece price range or lower.
CREE a while ago had mentioned that this would be happening in the market, and came out with the XLamp line, as well as several high power and high efficiency, and high power + high efficiency die product lines, as well as the most recent XR-E products. Their dies are used in the Seoul P4, Edixeon, as well as other products. It takes time for new products to get moving, as it takes time to design them into products.
In the high tech stock market, especially the cutting edge stuff, investors want to see very high growth, where you are seeing numbers like in the 40% gain, every quarter sustained. When a company is not showing growth like this, there are plenty of other high tech markets to invest your dollar into, which is part of what is likely going on here.
Unfortunately, until recently, CREE did not have a great distributor. In my opinion, their previous distributor did a very poor sales job, and didn't have the FAEs and sales folks to properly represent the product in person. Now that they have picked up Arrow, if they send the time to properly educate the Arrow Electronics representitives in the nitty gritty of their LEDs, they could easily see dramatic increases in their sales. Avnet and Arrow Electronics are the two largest component distributors in North America.
I see folks from corporate LumiLEDs several times a year, along with multiple visits from Future Electronics. OSRAM also comes by often in person, along with distributors and their sales reps. Even Nichia comes by, and they only sell direct.
As CREE moves into the mainstream LED market, if they push all the right buttons, FAEs with full knowledge of their products as well as their competitors products, along with understanding all the tiny specific questions and whys and hows, we could see a whole new ball of wax in the next year.
Right now, I see quite a number of various LED manufacturers, who often spin their products, and knock their competitors products with facts that often are not on the up and up. To me, this tells me that the competition in the LED market place is really heating up substantially.
The high power LED field is no longer just LumiLEDs, and a bunch of wannabes. There are a wide variety of products that do a better job, depending on what your focus and needs are. The Luxeon still has it's niche, but it certainly no longer exceeds in every aspect. LumiLEDs has recently introduced new products in a paper launch, but not actual products seem to be for sale at their distributor, nor datasheets on their website. We will have to see how the availability unfolds on these parts.
The competition in a capitalist free market system is a great thing, and we are seeing astounding advancements that not even the best scientific teams though would be possible for yet another 5 to 10 years. It is amazing and very exciting to watch.
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