CREE Sells LED Business

SubLGT · October 29, 2020, 4:25pm

DURHAM, N.C. – Cree, Inc. (Nasdaq: CREE) today announced that the Company has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its LED Products business unit (“Cree LED”) to SMART Global Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SGH) for up to $300 million, including fixed upfront and deferred payments and contingent consideration.

“We are pleased to announce the sale of our LED Products business to SMART, which represents another key milestone in our transformational journey to create a pure-play global semiconductor powerhouse,” said Cree CEO Gregg Lowe. “This transaction uniquely positions us with a sharpened strategic focus to lead the industry transition from silicon to silicon carbide and further strengthens our financial position, which will support continued investments to capitalize on multi-decade growth opportunities across EV, 5G and industrial applications. SMART has a strong platform and a solid track record of successfully acquiring and integrating technology businesses.”

Cree LED has one of the industry’s widest portfolios of highly efficient LED chips and high-performance LED components and represents one of the strongest brands in the industry. SMART is a global leader in specialty memory, storage and high-performance computing solutions serving the electronics industry for over 30 years. Leveraging SMART’s diverse customer base and global operations, Cree LED will be well positioned to continue to deliver industry leading products.

niajef · October 29, 2020, 4:40pm

what does this mean? can someone translate it into layman terms

1stein · October 29, 2020, 4:41pm

Anyway, I don’t think I’m gonna place the offer….

SubLGT · October 29, 2020, 5:19pm

I’m surprised the LED business was worth only $300 million.

SubLGT · October 29, 2020, 5:22pm

It means this for CREE:

flightless22 · October 29, 2020, 5:37pm

“[1]”:Cree stock jumps to one-year high on news it’s selling LED business for $300M | WRAL TechWire

The end of the road for cree leds?

Firelight2 · October 29, 2020, 6:07pm

Not necessarily.

Yes, the LED business will no longer be owned by Cree. But it will still be in business, just under new ownership. Also, the brand name isn’t changing. Those LEDs sold by the new owner will still be branded as “Cree”.

The real question is whether the new owner will keep all the research and engineering staff to enable them to advance their LED tech. I assume they will since the business wouldn’t be worth much unless they kept their market position.

niajef · October 29, 2020, 6:13pm

Firelight2:

flightless22:

The sale of the LED manufacturing business to SMART Global Holdings is part of Cree CEO Gregg Lowe’s mission to remake Cree since taking over as its top executive three years ago and focus on its WolfSpeed power supply and semiconductor efforts.

“[1]”:Cree stock jumps to one-year high on news it’s selling LED business for $300M | WRAL TechWire

The end of the road for cree leds?

Not necessarily.

Yes, the LED business will no longer be owned by Cree. But it will still be in business, just under new ownership. Also, the brand name isn’t changing. Those LEDs sold by the new owner will still be branded as “Cree”.

The real question is whether the new owner will keep all the research and engineering staff to enable them to advance their LED tech. I assume they will since the business wouldn’t be worth much unless they kept their market position.

i hope their quality doesnt go down

SubLGT · October 29, 2020, 6:33pm

The top 10 global lighting manufacturers for LED chips are……. ranked in descending order of LED technology quality:

Ranked first worldwide, CREE is based in the USA. This company manufactures LED chips ranging from 0.1W to 5W and COB LED bulbs from 5W to 200W. CREE bulbs can be used in all end-use applications, from indoor lighting to outdoor floodlighting.

In second place is Nichia. Founded in 1956, it produces a wide range of materials, such as phosphors, coating materials, transition material catalysts, organometallic compounds, and fine chemicals. Nichia’s other products include compound semiconductor materials, such as high-purity metals, single-crystal materials, and LED infrared epitaxial wafers.

Toyoda Gosei is in position three. It is a Japanese manufacturer known for using the same phosphor resources as Nichia, delivering superior light quality. The latest innovation from Toyoda Gosei is an LED that reproduces natural sunlight based on proprietary technology of mixing red, blue, and green phosphor.

In position four is OSRAM. Based in Germany, it offers a broad range of LEDs for the automotive industry. For general lighting, OSRAM has almost all types of SMD LEDs from 0.1W to 5W, in all dimension packages, i.e. 3030, 5050, 5630, 2835, and others.

In position five is Lumileds, an inventor of xenon technology and a leading innovator of high-performance LEDs. It offers automotive, mobile, IoT and illumination lighting. Lumileds was a joint venture between Agilent Technologies and Philips Lighting, but later fully acquired by Philips, which later sold 80.1% to U.S. investor group Apollo Global Management.

In sixth position is Seoul Semiconductor, a South Korean LED manufacturer. It develops LED chips for general lighting, automotive lighting, and backlighting. Seoul Semiconductor developed the world’s first high voltage AC driven LED.

Following is LG Innotek, a global materials and components engineering service company. This South Korean company develops key materials and components for automotive, mobile, IoT, display, semiconductor, and LED applications.

In eighth place is Edison Opto, based in Taiwan. Edison Opto’s product range includes SMD LED chips in all ranges, i.e. 3030, 2835, 5050, 5630 and high power SMD LED chips in 3535 packages. The company also manufactures COBs for high power applications up to 200W. Edison Opto’s major products are high power LED chips used in indoor, outdoor, and automotive applications.

EPISTAR is in ninth position. It is based in Taiwan. It sells LED products for cell phone screens, laptops, television, and more.

In position ten is San’an Optoelectronics, which is China’s largest producer of top-quality ultra-high bright LED epitaxial wafers and chips. The company has been rated as the enterprise with “National Model Project of High-tech industrialization” by the National Development and Reform Commission and the “Leading Company in Semi-Conductor Illumination Projects” by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China.

Sirstinky · October 29, 2020, 6:57pm

It just means ownership and control goes from Cree to this new business. I’ve been following it since it went down, and the LED business is too lucrative for the new company to drop it completely. There’s actually a lot of promise for future tech in LEDs, but Cree had come to the end of their commitment for advancement (obviously) and chose to focus on other areas of their business/ markets. Hopefully the new owners will be able to invest more time (and into it than Cree could and we get LEDs meant for flashlights and portable lighting, not streetlights and growing marijuana.

xxo · October 29, 2020, 7:21pm

So, will someone like latticebright get to make “genuine” Cree LEDs?

Lightbringer · October 29, 2020, 7:45pm

Probably just means Cree will have to up their game, since Nichia and Samsung are delivering better quality light with 219s and 351s.

Then you got the SSTs and multicolored flats to deal with…

So Cree seems to be positioned between quality-light LEDs and no-name commodity LED “beads”. When Latticebright doesn’t even bother making their LEDs look like Crees anymore, well…

And unless they fix the angular tint-shift issues, their mainstream LEDs might be in trouble. XP-G3, anyone? Horrible horrible horrible in a reflector, and even useless as a mule because it shoots yellow out the sides and blue out the top. And you can only diffuse the beam so much…

Lightbringer · October 29, 2020, 7:49pm

Oh yeh… just got one of those LED replacements for fluorescent tubes down by my washer. Decent, but the LEDs are mules, and I thought I had horrible yellow stains on my white shirt ’til I saw it was yellow bands of light instead.

Looks like I’m gonna hafta slap on some stick-on diffusion film on that, too.