What The Boss At The Leading LED Company Had To Say

Cree Inc.’s Q4/13 earnings phone call with analysts — 9,900-plus words! — can be found here. Having taken the time to browse through it, here are a few items that EleBlog visitors might appreciate (bolding by EleBlog) –

We recently announced the Cree BR30 LED bulb, which is available exclusively at the Home Depot. It delivers an LED bulb that works like a regular VR-style flood lightbulb, lights like a regular lightbulb and is priced to give consumers a reason to switch to LED.

Our partnership with the Home Depot has demonstrated that great products at great prices, combined with a world-class retailer and a serious investment in marketing, can change both consumer behavior and the product category faster than many of the skeptics predicted.

To put this in perspective, we believe that we have sold more Cree LED bulbs at the Home Depot since our launch than they’ve sold of all other A19 LED bulbs combined. We plan to continue to make a significant investment in marketing the Cree LED bulb in fiscal 2014, although Q1 spending will be incrementally lower than Q4 due to the timing of the various media activities.

AND

As we have stated in the past, we are not trying to be a traditional lighting company. We’re a technology company, developing products to fundamentally change the lighting experience. We are focused on enabling the applications that require significant product innovation to shift to LED. This plays to our strength in developing innovative category-changing products and our flexibility to take new approaches to deliver LED lighting to the real users of light.

AND

Yes, when I say new market segments, I — right now I think less about geographies in the short term and more about applications that are unserved. So you can argue that our UR product lets us do something no one has ever really done before, which is it’s not a lighting fixture and it’s not a bulb.

It’s essentially a product that enables a very large chunk of the electrical contractor industry to get into the LED upgrade business, and I’ll just use that as an example. I think we see other product segments that, with the right innovation, that we can then go after in maybe a slightly different way. And the example I gave you earlier was the petroleum market. There is an example where we have a slightly nontraditional way to go after those customers, really a channel that’s dedicated to that industry instead of one that’s dedicated to lighting specifically.

And I think in certain other specific market segments, there will be opportunities to kind of take a hybrid approach, which is we use our conventional channel, but also I’d say some industry-focused channels that can get us access there. So it’s less about acquisition and more about products to solve problems that aren’t solved yet, and then getting a sales focus on that very specific market.

All of the words are from Chuck Swoboda, the boss at Cree.

Source: http://electricalcontractor.com/?p=10800

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