Taiwan-based LED chipmaker Epistar announced the development for high-pressure warm white LEDs with efficiency of 150lm/W. This means the warm white LED lighting products that can replace the traditional 60W, 70W, even 100W can be introduced to the market in 2012.

Epistar believes the new breakthrough of technology is likely to help the firm's revenues from lighting to reach 30% in 2012.

The Europe and US markets tend to favor warm color lighting designs. According to studies, warm white light accounts for more than 60% of the global lighting market. However, the efficiency of warm white lights is lower than cold white light. Furthermore, warm white lights have a higher production cost than cold white light.

Epistar indicated that the introduction of high-pressure warm white light LED chip solutions will help the introduction of retrofit LED lightings to replace the 60W, 75W and even 100W traditional lights.

According to market research, the average selling price (ASP) of LED lightings to replace the traditional 40W lights is around US$22.60/unit by end of 2011. In particular, the ASPs of the product in Japan and South Korea have been around US$20/unit and US$11.40/unit respectively. Industry sources noted there is a possibility for the market to see the ASP of retrofit 60W LED light bulbs to drop to US$10/unit.