Hong Kong Lighting Fair invited me to speak at their trades how on 28 October, which featured 2600 exhibitors–about five times the size of LIGHTFAIR. My discussion was controversial because I encouraged the audience, mainly Chinese manufacturers wanting to sell in the US, to market their products through existing channels of distribution. I shared our own margins that we have and contrasted to an experiment we did a year ago where we sold some industrial highbays on Amazon. There is much greater profit in respecting the existing rep-distributor network. If Chinese companies sell direct, they will only earn single digit margins.
I asked the audience to guess why LumEfficient focuses on heavy industrial lighting. We prefer to sell IP 65 highbays and hazardous location lighting. One gentlemen suggested that we focused on heavy industrial because it had the highest energy savings. This was a very good guess, but the real reason that we sell industrial lighting is that it has the some of the highest gross margins in the industry. The audience seemed to appreciate this answer.
Thank you to the Hong Kong Trade Association who hosted me for this event.
