Smart power supply application is getting more tractions while being driven by the demand of emerging applications such as smart lighting and smart fast charging products etc. This new trend ushering new opportunities for power supply manufacturers to innovate and to breakthrough while facing the new wave of competition as well as opportunities.

Recently, LEDinside, the Optoelectronics Research Division of TrendForce Consulting Group, has an honour to interview, Mr. Hung Kwong Yee , Chairman of Ten Pao Group Holdings Ltd., to share his 40 years of research & development (R&D) experience in power supply manufacturing field, also, the current market view and future perspectives of power supply industry segment.

Focus on power supply research and development over 40 years, moving forward to global strategic deployment.

As one of the leading smart power supply solution manufacturers, founded in 1979, Hong Kong IPO in 2015 (HKex 1979), Ten Pao has been highly focusing on designing and manufacturing reliable competitive smart power supplies and one-stop solutions for global customers.

Having ploughed for over 40 years, with strong R&D capabilities and a best-in-class management team, Ten Pao provides wide range of product portfolios while keep delivering values to consumers as result of gaining the trust of global customers also leads the technological innovations of the industry.

Nowadays, the power supply technology of Ten Po has been widely used in different areas, such as consumer electronics, infotainment, home appliances, solid state LED lighting systems, industrial smart controls (power tools equipment) and next generation electric vehicle (EV) charging systems.

With increasing customer demand, Ten Pao has a global strategic production deployment in Mainland China, Hungary and Vietnam. These production sites are equipped with advanced automatic facilities also has multiple global sales offices in South Korea, Japan and USA respectively.

Vietnam production site has started mass production in Q2 of this year with a forecast of extra capacity in second half of the year. The second phase of the domestic production expansion plan in Dazhou City (Sichuan), has been completed on schedule. The new Digital Smart factory located in Huizhou Industrial Park (Guangdong), is also on the right track and expected start operation in 2022.

Even under the pandemic, Ten Pao Group has recorded good sales performance in the first half of 2021. Increasing demand of power supply products and growing customer purchase orders, Ten Pao has achieved YoY sales growth by 88%, up to HKD3,316 million.

“2021 is the first year of the 14th Five-Year Plan of the People’s Republic of China. China Government has an aggressive economic growth plan; hence, the demand of consumer electronic product is expected to increase while finally will bring-in the needs of high-end smart PD chargers and super-fast charger products. This foreseeable sales growth is in-line with the strategic plan of Ten Pao Group”, Mr. Hung Kwong Yee, said.

Strategic Plan of Smart Lighting Area, Product roadmap migration from indoor to outdoor applications.

LED driver segment is one of the key strategic business focuses of Ten Pao Group. Currently, Ten Pao focuses on indoor home use applications such as table lamp, ceiling lamp, panel lights and combo ventilation lighting home devices (e.g exhaust fan embedded with LED lighting) etc. In the future, Ten Pao will keep serving mega lighting clients to explore new business opportunities.

The trend of lighting product control is connecting with other electric appliances, this synergy effect ends up develop new product features. With experience in R&D, driven by market demand, Ten Pao’s R&D team upgrades regular constant current and constant voltage drivers with smart control features and thermal sensors etc to enhance the values of LED drivers.

Under strategic plan, Ten Pao LED driver business keeps stable growth at 20% annually. By 2020, the sales revenue of LED driver was HK456 million while forecast it will be growing to HKD500 million by end of 2021.

Mr. Hung also mentioned that Ten Pao group has invested in factory automation in past few years, aiming at improving quality control, highly focus on lighting driver business and to provide power solutions to lighting customers, moving forward, smart lighting will be the key focus as well.

Ten Pao started smart lighting driver business since 2009. In 2019, while home smart lighting business was booming up, Ten Po has followed this new trend by development of wide rage of products compatible with MiJia (米家), Huawei(華為) and Alibaba(阿里) smart control platforms. Now, Ten Pao has completed the product strategy planning of Smart Lighting control and will keep focus on development of smart lighting control related power driver products.

The Total available market size (TAM) of general illumination, horticultural lighting and smart lighting has stable growth, together with the 3rd generation of semiconductor materials such as Silicon Carbide (SiC), Gallium Nitride (GaN), there will be more new opportunities on LED driver applications while these new materials could facilitate more high-power compact designs. Ten Pao would extend LED driver product portfolio from indoor to outdoor.

Deep-dive in Smart Power Supply Strategy, migration to high-speed digitized intelligence future developments

In addition to the forward-looking strategic layout of smart power product plan, Ten Pao also closely follows market trends, actively expands and upgrades the application of smart power products, and takes the lead of industry development.

Mr Hung said, “Commercialization of 5G technology is expected to promote more commercial applications together with technological innovations. For instance, Internet of things (IoT), smart home applications. Ten Pao will pay close attention to the next technology, garbing new trend and increase production capacity in need.

From the global production capacity strategy, Ten Pao will continue to expand the production capacity of its Vietnam production base, add additional production lines in the future. Nevertheless, Ten Pao will continue to look for more opportunities for capacity expansion in Southeast Asia, South Asia and North Americas.

For Mainland China domestic production capacity, Ten Pao will continue to use factories in Huizhou, Guangdong and Dazhou (Sichuan) as its main production bases, steadily expand its domestic market share, keeping development of innovative businesses, and further increase the proportion of automated production. In addition, with the foreseeable new plants deployments in Huizhou Industrial Park, Ten Pao's domestic production capacity will get further increase.

Ten Pao is actively promoting intelligent and digitized production management upgrade, aiming at improving production efficiency, risk assessments and strengthen it’s ability to deal with potential uncertainties. Ten Pao intelligent manufacturing department not only optimize automated production lines and manage production data, but also to collect big data, enabling management to ensure product quality with accurate data while finally improve overall production efficiency and capabilities.

As a matter of fact, Ten Pao Group will keep advancing it’s intelligent and digital transformation, a “Smart production network” will work throughout the standardized production process with highest level of efficiency and leads the group migrates to the next generation of smart intelligence digitized production.