PRESENTATION

COVID-19’s pandemic - The spark for UVC LEDs’ market ramp-up!

Finally, we are here. After more than 10 years of waiting, in 2020, the UV LED market could ramp up and reach the billion-dollar mark very rapidly. There is good in everything bad, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic has created some perfect use-cases for the technology to spread across a rapidly changing disinfection/purification market. From being worth around $20M in 2008, UV LEDs reached a first milestone in 2015 by attaining the $100M market level. Such growth was mostly driven by UVA LEDs that were increasingly used in UV curing applications. But further growth was then restricted by the industry’s overcapacity and strong price pressure. In this context, the attention of the industry was then focused on UVC LEDs that could act as a game-changer for disinfection/purification applications. But UVC LED technology is intrinsically different than for UVA LEDs. And whereas UVA LEDs’ External Quantum Efficiency (EQE) has rapidly reached more than 50%, UVC LEDs’ EQE is still below 10% in most commercial devices. Consequently, the technology was not considered mature by integrators and only early adopters started implementing it. But that was before COVID-19 pandemic. To reduce spread of the disease, many recommendations have been made by the World Health Organization and governments/authorities. In this field, UV lighting, which can deactivate bacteria and viruses through physical methods, has gained unprecedented attention. The COVID-19 pandemic has created momentum for the UVC LED industry. From $144M in 2019, the UVC LED market has more than doubled in 2020 to reach $308M. With market growth now being triggered, we expect it to be worth more than $2.5B in 2025, driven first by surface applications and then water ones.