The complete report for the Japanese industry for automotive lighting is now available for download by DVN Gold Members. To build the report, primary author Jean-Paul Ravier and his lighting co-expert Hitoshi Takahashi, visited Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Koito, Stanley, and Ichikoh in Japan.
Japan has a very strong automotive industry with a global market share for car production reaching 29%, far ahead of American (18%) or German (16%) makers. Among Japan’s strong players are Toyota, № 1 in capitalisation; Nissan, who are with the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance № 1 in the world for quantity of cars produced, as well as Honda, Suzuki, Isuzu, Mazda, and Subaru. For lighting, Japanese set makers control 35% of the worldwide market. In this market, Koito are the worldwide set maker leader with 22% market share in value, with Stanley and Ichikoh being the other main Japanese set makers.
Toyota and Koito were early pioneers for LED lighting in 2007. Now LEDs are in another developmental phase with a strong standardisation to decrease costs and thereby expand application as seen on the performant LED bi-function modules developed by Koito, now with just one LED and no fan for better compactness and lower cost. These are used on many Toyota models.