4. Looking ahead to "Lighting 4.0"!

Since 2010, lighting manufacturers have been forced to move towards "LEDification", in a bid to quickly recoup their huge investments in the sector. This aggressive strategy means that older lighting technologies must be abandoned and their manufacture discontinued in the short term, even if LEDs cannot replace them for certain niche applications.

The lighting industry is in turmoil as new players from the world of electronics appear and disappear at a rapid pace. The industry's former oligopolists are seeing their business model, based on the sale of replacement lamps, shaken to the core. Their reactions are almost "spasmodic": they divest themselves of their lighting branch, which changes name or shareholder, and they become prey at the mercy of the biggest manufacturers in the digital sector, for whom lighting is just a sub-function of a complex system....