Plant lighting entered the "eve of commercialization breakout", the giants have long been standing

At the end of December last year, the "Yokosuka Toshiba Clean Room Farm" in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, which has been in operation for more than two years, quietly came to an end. In a statement issued, Toshiba once said: "The closure of the plant factory will also stop the production and sale of vegetables such as lettuce."

Although most of the plant factories in Japan are at a loss, Japanese technology companies are actively promoting the overseas export of plant factories, and mainland China is one of the main target markets.

Yesterday, Jingdong Group and Japan's Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Group started business cooperation in the field of plant factories. JD will be involved in vegetable production, and Mitsubishi Chemical will provide plant plants and cultivation techniques.

The project is expected to have a total investment of nearly 50 million yuan. It will build a plant plant of about 10,000 square meters in Tongzhou, Beijing, and put it into operation before the spring of 2018. At the same time, Jingdong will continue to build self-operated plant factories in Shanghai and Guangzhou to expand its fresh business.

In 2015, Japan's Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Group began to implement a large-scale plant factory model in mainland China. According to the plan, by 2017, 50 plant factories will be built in 15 provinces such as Jiangsu.

On the supply side, the LED industry has benefited from the market in short supply in 2017. LED chip maker Jingdian said that the overall demand in the third quarter of this year is good, especially for the four-element LED niche products such as plant lighting.

Judgment on the trend of the future plant lighting market

1. Plant lighting is expected to start in the next three years. On the one hand, it benefits from the strengthening of the concept of “no pollution, health and safety” of agricultural products in the Chinese market, and the improvement of consumption power; on the other hand, it is different from the LED plants in the past. Lighting companies have built and promoted their own. More platforms like Jingdong and other channels are also strengthening the integration of resources in the upstream supply chain, including e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Tmall, which are also strengthening the development of self-operated businesses.

2. The trend of diversified product layout of LED companies in the middle and upper reaches is obvious. The research and development layout of products including plant lighting, automotive lighting, and ultraviolet infrared has entered the mass production stage, which will quickly push down the price of products. In the past, one of the main reasons for the high cost of plant lighting was the high cost and long investment income.

3. Compared with general lighting, the gap between R&D layout of Chinese LED companies in plant lighting and foreign companies is relatively small. Whether it is capital strength or the size of a company, it is not the same as a decade ago. This will undoubtedly accelerate the penetration rate of localization of plant lighting.

Philips Lighting

Recently, Philips Lighting announced that it intends to supply LED plant growth lamps for the Russian greenhouse agricultural product cultivation company LLC Agro-Invest for greenhouse cultivation of tomatoes and cucumbers, with a greenhouse area of ​​about 25 hectares (approximately 40 football fields).

According to Philips Lighting, the project is the largest plant lighting project they have undertaken, supplying lamps that help plants grow throughout the year and increase yields, especially in winter. Compared to traditional high-pressure sodium lamps, their LED plant growth lamps can save about 50% of energy costs.

Philips Lighting will supply Agro-Invest with 65,000 1.25-meter-long Philips Green Power dome lights and 57,000 2.5-meter-long Philips Green Power Interlight. In addition, Philips will provide lighting solutions and training services to meet the growing needs of cucumbers and tomatoes.

Osram

On May 18th, OSRAM announced the acquisition of a stake in a German startup, Agrilution, to capture plant lighting.

OSRAM has previously developed lighting solutions for greenhouse plants, and the smart home appliances developed by Agrilution can be used to identify the seeds grown in the cabinets and to automatically adjust the temperature, watering and lighting after applying the LED lighting technology from OSRAM. Conditions allow users to grow flowers, vegetables and vegetables without being affected by the weather.

Sanan Optoelectronics

At the end of 2015, Sanan Optoelectronics and the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly established the “Zhongan Sanan”, which was headed by the vice president of the group and was also responsible for Lin Xiucheng’s son-in-law. It is estimated that the total investment in the four years will be 7 billion yuan.

In June 2016, Zhongke Sanan used its own intellectual property technology to build the world's largest 100,000-class clean, fully artificial light plant factory in the Hutou Photoelectric Industrial Park. At present, there are four kinds of lettuce vegetables in batches, and there are more than 200 sales counters in supermarkets such as Carrefour, Yonghui and Yuanchu in Xiamen, Fuzhou and Quanzhou.

This year, Zhongke Sanan expects to spend 80 million yuan on research and development. It will continue to develop at a rate of no less than 1,000 to 120 million yuan per year next year. The research team is now about 40 to 50 people, and will expand to two. A team of more than 100 people.

In the future, we will operate in three systems, first of all, “production technology”, using mature central control systems to ensure which plants and herbs can be cultivated; and then the concept of “whole plant output”, semi-automatic plant in Quanzhou, in the United States. There is also a Las Vegas, but because of the high labor costs in the United States, "it is expected to launch a fully automated plant factory this month", in addition to the central control center, fully automated!

Fujitsu

At the end of last year, Fujitsu announced a joint venture with the Brazilian agricultural production company Robbe's Little Garden, which was funded by Fujitsu and its subsidiary Fujitsu Kyushu Island.

Fujitsu said that in the future, it will build a plant factory about 100 kilometers away from Helsinki, the capital of Finland, with an investment of about 300 million yuan. It is expected to produce lettuce and Babi lettuce from the first half of 2017, with an annual production capacity of 240 tons.

The joint venture will be equipped with the latest plant plant technology, including SaaS services for agricultural production management (a smart agricultural service solution based on Akisai, Akisai is a food and agricultural cloud service launched by Fujitsu), multi-layer cultivation racks and complete labor Light LED lighting. Fujitsu also plans to package the expertise and cloud services brought by this business and deploy it throughout the EU.

Fujitsu is a company that entered the plant factory earlier. In 2012, Fujitsu began running a cloud-based IT service that supported all aspects of outdoor agriculture and greenhouse agriculture management, and then extended the service to plant factories. In 2013, Fujitsu used government subsidies to partially modify its semiconductor factory in Fukushima Prefecture to produce low-potassium vegetables for people with special dietary needs.

Matsushita

Matsushita began researching the artificial light plant system in 2012. In August 2013, the company built a pilot plant at the company's Fukushima plant and began selling the system in April 2014.

Last year, Matsushita announced that it had delivered the "Artificial Light Plant Factory System" to SG Greenhouse, a subsidiary of the Western Japan Gas Company. SG Greenhouse began to carry out cultivation demonstration experiments in January 2016, and will start selling “low-potassium lettuce” that will reduce the potassium content to less than 20% (98 mg/100 g or less).

In the first half of this year, Panasonic's Panasonic brand vegetables were produced at the Suzhou Matsushita Plant and have been listed in Suzhou Supermarket. As early as August 2014, the vegetables produced by the Panasonic Group's “vegetable factory” were listed in Singapore and supplied to the Japanese-style chain restaurant “Dahu House” in Singapore.

AeroFarms

Jinshajiang Capital invested in Aeroeroero Farms arms in the early US in 2013 and is still the single largest shareholder of the company. In the past 10 years, AeroFarms has invested heavily in research and development and technology. Since its inception, AeroFarms has planted more than 250 vegetable varieties.

In 2016, AeroFarms decided to build the world's largest vertical farm in Newark, close to 70,000 square feet of facilities and produce 2 million pounds of vegetables and spices per year.

Jinshajiang Capital has obtained the exclusive technology authorization of AeroFarms Greater China, introduced the world's leading plant factory technology, combined with the industrial resources accumulated by Jinsha River in China, and jointly developed China's modern agriculture. It is expected that the first plant will build the first 10 full-scale plant factories in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou.