Electric Lighting Equipment Manufacturing (U.S., NAICS 33513)

A Histometrics rollup primer for public-market and private investors.

NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the standard the U.S. government uses to group businesses. This primer covers the five-digit industry 33513 — Electric Lighting Equipment Manufacturing — and how its three child industries differ.

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1. Overview

This is the U.S. industry that makes everything that lights a building or a street: the bulbs and lamps that produce the light, and the fixtures ("luminaires") that hold and aim it — from a bedroom chandelier to a warehouse high-bay to a city streetlight. Federal statistics divide it into three pieces: residential fixtures (335131), commercial/industrial/institutional fixtures (335132), and bulbs plus other lighting gear (335139) [1].

Why an investor should care, and why the three pieces don't move together: this is a branded specialty-manufacturing industry — the money is in design, engineering, brand, specification relationships, and increasingly controls and software, not in bent metal or blown glass. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) put a number on that: 89% of the value added in a domestically manufactured LED luminaire is attributable to the United States, even though the LED chip inside it is almost certainly Asian [10]. All three children share the same three forces (the LED transition, heavy import dependence, and tariff whipsaw), but they point in different directions. Commercial lighting is a low-growth, cash-generative, consolidating business with one clear public champion. Bulbs are a structurally shrinking, largely foreign-owned commodity. Residential fixtures are a cyclical, housing-linked, design-driven category owned almost entirely by private equity and families. LED means light-emitting diode — the technology that reshaped all three.

The single most useful fact for a stock-picker: across this entire ~$15 billion domestic industry there is essentially one investable-scale U.S.-listed pure-play lighting manufacturer (Acuity), one foreign global leader (Signify), and two listed satellites so small they are rounding errors beside it — LSI (small-cap) and Orion Energy Systems (micro-cap) [25][26][27][28]. Everything else is private, private-equity-owned, foreign-owned, or a diversified company where lighting is a slice. Private investors, not public ones, own most of this industry.

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2. What's inside — the three child industries and how they differ

The level splits into three NAICS industries. They differ in size, direction, ownership, and how (or whether) you can buy them. Lead with the contrast:

* Share of the level's 2022 domestic shipments; the three child figures sum to the level's $15.36 billion [1][3][4][5].

How the economics differ, in one line each:

• Commercial (335132) — sell configured hardware through a specification channel (architects/engineers spec it, distributors sell it, contractors install it), then attach higher-margin controls. Acuity's own estimate is that its addressable new-construction and renovation markets are roughly equal in size — new build is cyclical, retrofit is the energy-payback-driven cushion [25].
• Bulbs (335139) — a consumables business whose razor-and-blades replacement cycle was destroyed by LED longevity: a good white LED runs 30,000–50,000 hours against roughly 1,000 for the incandescent it replaced [12]. Commodity screw-in bulbs are a race to the bottom against Chinese scale — China produces roughly 90% of the world's LED bulbs [18] — and margin lives only in specialty (horticulture, UV-C disinfection, tunable) and connected products [5].
• Residential (335131) — a branded consumer-durable business tied to home sales and remodeling. Commodity big-box fixtures earn thin margins; premium "to-the-trade" designer lighting (sold through interior designers) earns 45%+ gross margins on design exclusivity [3].

One shared structural truth: in all three, many firms counted as "manufacturers" are really design-brand-and-assembly houses that engineer here and source components or finished goods from Asia. That is why the domestic factory statistics below are a floor, not the size of the business.

A boundary warning that applies to all three: the 2022 NAICS revision renumbered this entire level. Residential fixtures moved from 335121 to 335131 and commercial fixtures from 335122 to 335132 — code changes, not new industries — while 335139 is genuinely new, formed by merging the old bulb code (335110) with "other lighting equipment" (335129); the SBA reported that 335129 supplied 82% of the firms and 74–75% of the combined receipts and employment [7]. Pre-2022 series labeled 335122 should be read straight through; a pre-2022 "335139" does not exist and has to be rebuilt from two predecessors [7].

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3. How big it is (the rollup)

Our ground-truth federal figures for the whole level, NAICS 33513:

The children now carry clean, matching counts, so the level can be decomposed exactly:

Sources: Economic Census (2022) for firms; County Business Patterns (2023) for the rest; SBA size standards [1][2][3][4][5][6].

Three things jump out of that decomposition. Commercial is the employer — half the level's people work there, in plants averaging roughly 39 employees. Bulbs pay the most per head (~$80,000, versus ~$69,300 in commercial) despite being the commodity end, a sign that what is left of U.S. lamp-and-specialty production is capital-intensive and technical rather than assembly labor. And the SBA thresholds are unusually generous — 600 to 1,250 employees, against a level in which almost no firm is that large — so effectively every company here counts as "small" for federal contracting [6].

Two reconciliation notes for the numerate reader. First, the three children's 2022 shipments ($2.88B + $6.95B + $5.53B) sum exactly to the level's $15.36 billion [1][3][4][5] — a clean check. Second, the children's firm counts add to 972 while the level reports 963 firms [1]; the small gap is expected, because a company that manufactures in more than one of the three sub-industries is counted once at the level but can appear in two child counts. The employment, payroll, and establishment rows above are simple sums of the child figures (the level-wide versions of those specific metrics were not in our ground-truth file for this code). As an independent cross-check, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 38,190 jobs in the electric-lighting-equipment industry (NAICS 335100) in May 2023 with a median wage of $23.55 an hour [8] — above the County Business Patterns sum, and a reminder that different federal series draw the boundary and the reference period differently. The gap between that $23.55 median and the ~$73,500 average payroll per worker is itself informative: payroll here includes a large design, engineering, and commercial staff sitting above the production floor.

The undercount caveat is large, and it runs the same direction in all three children. Federal manufacturing statistics measure only what U.S. factories ship; they do not capture imports — and the U.S. is a deeply import-dependent lighting market. Total U.S. lamp-and-fixture imports (customs heading HS 9405) ran roughly $9.17 billion in 2024, with China at about 37%, down from ~46% in 2022 as sourcing shifted to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Mexico [17]; an estimated ~90% of LED bulbs sold here are imported [18]; and private research pegs the overall U.S. lighting-fixtures market near $20 billion and the U.S. LED-lighting market near $11.8 billion in 2024 [22]. Read the ~$15 billion federal number as "the U.S. lighting factory floor," not "the U.S. lighting business." Undercount is worst in residential (335131), where well-known "American" brands design here but build abroad, and in bulbs (335139), where domestic production has been shrinking for two decades — Savant closed GE Lighting's last U.S. bulb and glass plants, at Bucyrus and Logan, Ohio, in 2022 [31].

Beware apples-to-oranges market sizings. IBISWorld puts all U.S. lighting-fixture manufacturing — residential plus commercial/industrial, excluding bulbs — at roughly $15.2 billion of 2025 revenue [21], which is close to the federal figure for the whole level including bulbs [1]; and the USITC found that a broad measure of U.S. fixture demand (residential, non-residential, outdoor, and trade) exceeded $18 billion in 2018 — a number it explicitly warned should not be conflated with narrow-industry manufacturing output [24]. These measures are not wrong; they are counting different things. What DOE's supply-chain work adds is where the counted value actually sits: 89% of a domestically manufactured LED luminaire's value added is U.S., concentrated in design, assembly, certification, and channel — not in making the semiconductor [10].

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4. The investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

There is no clean pure-play basket for the level, and access differs sharply by child. Reserve tickers for this section.

Public companies (the whole level has only a handful of real ones):

A telling pattern — the big diversified industrials left. Eaton sold Cooper Lighting to Signify ($1.4B, 2020) [29]; GE sold Current to American Industrial Partners (2019) and its lamp business to Savant (2020), then closed its last U.S. bulb plants (2022) [30][31]; Hubbell sold its commercial/industrial lighting to GE Current (2022) and then exited residential by selling Progress Lighting (2024) [30][34]; Cree left lighting entirely [33]. Well-run electricals decided lighting wasn't where they wanted capital — a signal about the industry's growth and margins.

Where the real ownership sits — private, PE, and foreign, by child:

• 335132 commercial — Current/HLI Brands (private equity: American Industrial Partners, which bought Current from GE in 2019 and folded in Hubbell's C&I lighting in 2022), Cree Lighting (sold by Cree to IDEAL Industries in 2019 and on to CLNA Holdings / the ADLT family in 2023), RAB, Lumenpulse, Amerlux, MaxLite, the family-owned H.E. Williams, plus Cooper now inside Signify [4][29][30][33].
• 335139 bulbs — GE Lighting (Savant), Feit, Satco/Nuvo, TCP, MaxLite, Green Creative (private); Ledvance (the former Osram lamp business, wholly owned by China's MLS Co. since 2018) and Sylvania lamps (Shanghai Feilo); and the vast Chinese manufacturing cluster around Zhongshan, Guangdong that makes most of the world's bulbs [18][31][32].
• 335131 residential — Visual Comfort (AEA/Goldman/Leonard Green/Seidler), Coleto Brands = Kichler + Progress (Kingswood Capital), plus Quoizel, Hinkley, WAC, Currey, Minka and other family independents [35][36].

What this stuff actually trades for. The children now supply enough disclosed marks to sketch a private-market range — and they cluster below one times sales. Hubbell's commercial/industrial lighting business, with roughly $515 million of 2020 sales, changed hands for about 0.65× sales; Progress Lighting, on $187.1 million of 2023 revenue, sold for $131 million ≈ 0.70× trailing sales; Kichler went for $125 million net of cash, on which Masco booked an $88 million loss without disclosing Kichler's standalone revenue [30][34]. At the top end, Eaton's Cooper Lighting fetched $1.4 billion and Hunter Fan $845 million [29][37]. Two cautions the children are explicit about: 0.70× trailing sales is an observed transaction, not an industry multiple, and it should not be applied without margin, working-capital, growth, and adjacency adjustments [3]; and the two published figures for the Hubbell C&I sale disagree — Hubbell's completion release put it at $332.8 million while its FY2021 10-K described a $350 million transaction, a gap most likely reflecting announced versus final adjusted consideration [30]. We report both rather than pick.

Bottom line for allocators: value concentrates in 335132, and that is also the only child with credible public access — Acuity is the flagship, LSI and Orion are the satellites, Signify is the international leader. Bulbs (335139) are best played through Signify or accepted as a private/foreign game. Residential (335131) has no public pure-play and is essentially a private-equity roll-up sector.

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5. How the money works

Owners across this level make money the way branded specialty manufacturers do — not the way a utility, a REIT, or a miner does. The right mental model is: revenue ≈ construction-and-renovation activity × specification/brand win-rate × price-and-mix; profit is defended by design, channel relationships, and a move up into controls and software.

• Margins follow brand and mix, not tonnage — and the spread across the level is enormous. At the top, Acuity's lighting segment ran 45.8% gross and 16.4% operating margin on $3.6 billion of fiscal-2025 sales [25], and premium residential "to-the-trade" lines aim higher still on gross margin [3]. Below that, LSI's lighting operating margin was about 12% [26] and Orion's lighting gross margin 26.6% before corporate expenses [27]. Signify's own segment disclosure spans 4.8% (OEM components) to 16.1% (Conventional lighting) — evidence that a structurally declining legacy category can stay profitable after capacity rationalization while a more competitive electronics business earns less [28]. Scale, specification position, and controls content — not the factory — explain the gap.
• The channel is a moat. Commercial and bulb project sales are specification-driven (win the architect/engineer spec, sell through independent rep agents and electrical distributors); premium residential runs through the designer/architect trade; commodity product runs through big-box retail and Amazon, where buyers hold the pricing power [3][4][5].
• Two demand streams with different cycles. New construction is cyclical; retrofit/renovation is steadier and driven by energy-payback math — an efficient fixture that cuts a building's power bill pays for itself in a few years, and utility rebates shorten that. Acuity treats its addressable new-construction and renovation markets as roughly equal [25]. Retrofit is the counter-cyclical cushion, strongest in commercial.
• Project lumpiness is real at the small end. LSI's fiscal-2025 lighting sales fell 5% purely because large prior-year projects did not repeat, and Orion's LED-lighting revenue fell 22% on fewer large projects and softer ESCO and distribution activity [26][27]. Quarterly results for anyone below Acuity's scale are project-driven, not trend-driven.
• Input costs and the tariff swing. Labor is modest (payroll is roughly a sixth of receipts across the level). The variable levers are the bill of materials — steel and aluminum housings, LED chips and drivers, glass, plastics, rare-earth phosphors — plus ocean freight and tariffs. Because so much is imported, tariff and freight moves whip margins directly; the lag between cost inflation and price realization compresses margins even for firms that eventually pass costs through, and pass-through is easier at the premium end than the commodity end [3][4][17][18].
• The value-migration story, level-wide. In every child, bare hardware is commoditizing and value is moving to the system: controls, connectivity, the Internet of Things (IoT — networked sensors and data), and software/services. The runway is quantified: DOE reported that roughly two-thirds of U.S. commercial buildings still have no lighting control beyond a switch [11], while the global connected-lighting market was about $21.7 billion in 2024, growing ~20% a year [23]. ASP (average selling price) rises with smart and specialty features even when unit volume is flat. Whoever wins controls and software should out-earn whoever is left selling bare metal or glass.

Balance-sheet note: broad seasonal SKU catalogs and long import lead times tie up inventory and working capital, and PE-owned platforms typically carry meaningful debt.

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6. What drives demand

Demand is the sum of three overlapping engines, weighted differently across the children:

• Construction cycles (all three). Non-residential building (offices, warehouses, factories, schools, hospitals, data centers) drives commercial fixtures and much of the bulb/first-fit demand; residential construction and existing-home turnover drive home fixtures. Consensus forecasts put non-residential building spending up only about 1.7% in 2025 and 1–2% in 2026, with data centers and warehouses strong and offices weak [19]; on the housing side, the U.S. started an estimated 1.359 million units in 2025, 0.6% below 2024 [20].
• Retrofit and energy efficiency (the most durable driver), and the size of the runway. DOE's market characterization counted 8.149 billion installed lamps and luminaires in U.S. residential and commercial buildings in 2020, with LEDs at roughly 48% of the installed base versus 8% in 2015 and 1% in 2010; those buildings consumed 244 TWh for lighting, about 14% of U.S. electricity [9]. Commercial buildings alone held 1.6 billion lighting installations, split roughly 47% LED against 48% linear fluorescent — and penetration is wildly uneven by sector, from 21% in education to 45% in warehouses, 46% in offices, and 64% in food service [9]. That remaining fluorescent base is the retrofit pipeline, and higher electricity prices shorten its payback.
• The LED and fluorescent transition. The one-time incandescent-to-LED retrofit wave is largely spent, but the fluorescent-to-LED conversion — forced by state bans and the coming federal standard — is the live near-term tailwind for bulbs and tubes, and it drags fixtures along [12][13].
• Controls, connectivity, and specialty niches. Connected lighting (~$21.7B globally in 2024, ~20% annual growth) is the industry's fastest-growing pocket and its main margin story; Signify alone reported an installed base of 144 million connected light points at the end of 2024 [23][28]. Horticulture, UV-C disinfection, human-centric and tunable lighting, and municipal smart-street-lighting conversions add specialty growth.
• Housing turnover and remodeling (residential). Existing-home sales trigger move-in renovations; home equity and consumer confidence fund discretionary "statement" lighting. Remodeling — supported by an aging housing stock — is the larger and steadier of the two residential streams even when turnover is frozen [3][21].
• Incentives. Utility rebate programs, the federal Section 179D energy-efficient-commercial-buildings deduction, and public/institutional budgets pull demand forward, especially in commercial [4].

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7. Regulation

Lighting is lightly regulated as a business but tightly regulated as a product, and regulation is mostly a demand tailwind for efficient gear.

• Federal efficiency standards. DOE enforces a 45-lumens-per-watt minimum for general-service lamps (effective August 2023) that ended most incandescent and halogen sales, with a step above 120 lm/W carrying a July 25, 2028 compliance date that would eliminate compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). The rules apply to defined general-service lamps and carve out certain specialty lamps — a distinction routinely missed in market commentary. This bites hardest on bulbs (335139) but drags fixtures along [12].
• State fluorescent bans and mercury rules. California, Vermont, Colorado, Oregon, Rhode Island and others have banned mercury-containing fluorescent tubes and CFLs on staggered dates (many from 2025), with Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine and New York phasing in through 2029 — driven by the global Minamata Convention on Mercury [13]. Spent fluorescent, HID, mercury-vapor, high-pressure-sodium and metal-halide lamps also fall under EPA universal-waste handling rules, so the legacy installed base carries an end-of-life liability as well as a replacement opportunity [14].
• Building energy codes. ASHRAE 90.1, the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), and California's Title 24 cap lighting power and mandate controls (occupancy sensing, daylight dimming); each tightening obsoletes older commercial fixtures. DOE determined the 2022 edition of ASHRAE 90.1 improves whole-building site energy efficiency by about 9.8% over its predecessor — a whole-building figure, not a lighting-only forecast, but code adoption reliably pushes lighting-power density down and controls content up [11]. On the residential side, Title 24's JA8 rules (≥45 lm/W, CRI ≥90, dimmable, low flicker) effectively set the national residential spec [15].
• Safety and rebate gatekeeping. Fixtures must carry a Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory listing to be installed under the National Electrical Code — fixed luminaires commonly under UL 1598, portable under UL 153, LED equipment under UL 8750, with wet-location and ingress-protection requirements added outdoors [16]. Connected products add FCC Part 15 and RoHS. For commercial product, the DesignLights Consortium (DLC) Qualified Products List is required by roughly 700 utility and efficiency programs — effectively a license to compete for rebate-driven demand [16]. Note one recent subtraction: EPA sunset the general ENERGY STAR luminaires and lamps specifications at the end of 2024 because efficient lighting had become the market standard, retaining a program only for qualifying downlights [14].
• Trade policy (the big swing). Chinese lighting imports face a base most-favored-nation duty of roughly 3.9% plus Section 301 tariffs (25% and layered increases), pushing combined rates commonly cited around 30–50% and above on some products [17][18]. USMCA governs Mexican-origin product, and "Buy American"/Build America provisions favor domestic content on federally funded projects. Tariffs simultaneously raise input costs and shield domestic/branded players — the net effect swings with policy and is hard to underwrite.

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8. Concentration and consolidation

A genuine rollup insight: the level looks far less concentrated than any of its children. Federal concentration ratios (CRn = the share of receipts held by the top n firms; HHI = Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, where under 1,500 is "unconcentrated"):

The level's top-4 share (26.2%) and HHI (255.8) are lower than any individual child's because each child has a different leader — Acuity dominates commercial, Signify and Chinese conglomerates dominate bulbs, Visual Comfort and Coleto lead residential — so no single firm sits atop all three. Aggregating three separately-led sub-industries dilutes apparent concentration. Residential (335131) is by far the most concentrated within itself (top-4 at 64%), while commercial is the most fragmented. That residential pattern is long-standing rather than new: the USITC found the four largest firms already held 71% of residential-sector receipts in 2017, with small and medium enterprises accounting for 98% of firms but only 39% of receipts — a concentrated top tier over a long tail of design-led specialists [24]. Add imports, and every effective competitive field is more crowded than the domestic figures suggest.

The consolidation story differs by child:

• Commercial (335132) — a story of big electricals leaving: Eaton, Hubbell, GE and Cree all exited between 2019 and 2023, handing the field to focused operators (Acuity) and private equity (Current/HLI Brands under American Industrial Partners; Cree Lighting under CLNA/ADLT) [29][30][33].
• Bulbs (335139) — a changing of the guard to foreign and private owners: GE's lamps to Savant, Osram's to Ledvance and then to MLS Co. of China, Sylvania's to Shanghai Feilo, as Western giants fled the commoditizing lamp [31][32].
• Residential (335131) — an active private-equity roll-up: Kingswood merged Kichler and Progress into Coleto Brands in 2024; AEA and partners built Visual Comfort into the premium leader [34][35][36].

The common thread — and the clearest evidence that operators believe it — is that differentiation is migrating to controls, connectivity, software, and brand, which are stickier and harder to import than bare hardware. Acuity spent roughly $1.2 billion on audio-visual controls firm QSC and bought ams OSRAM's North American Digital Systems business, buying its way into the smart-building layer rather than competing on fixtures [39]; Signify has pivoted to connected lighting and services while its total sales shrank from €6.1 billion in 2024 to €5.8 billion in 2025 — conventional lighting declining faster than connected lighting grows [28].

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9. Risks

Level-wide, weighted by child:

• The LED longevity paradox (all three, worst in bulbs). A good white LED runs 30,000–50,000 hours against roughly 1,000 for an incandescent, so the one-time retrofit wave pulls demand forward and permanently lengthens the replacement cadence — you now sell a fixture or bulb once for many years [12]. Integrated designs partly offset this by forcing replacement of the whole luminaire when a proprietary driver or light engine fails, but the interval is still far longer than the old burn-out cycle [3].
• Import competition and price deflation. Chinese scale sets the floor price — roughly 90% of the world's LED bulbs — and LED prices have fallen for years, pressuring commodity product hardest (bulbs, builder-grade fixtures) [18]. Residential fixture imports alone rose 43% between 2010 and 2019, led by China [24].
• Tariff whipsaw. ~90% China sourcing in bulbs and heavy import reliance in fixtures mean trade policy directly moves costs and supply — a threat and a partial shield, hard to underwrite. Sourcing is diversifying (China fell from ~46% to ~37% of lighting imports between 2022 and 2024), but qualifying an alternate factory takes time, and tariffs raise landed costs without meaningfully reshoring bulb production [17][18].
• Cyclicality and project lumpiness. Commercial tracks non-residential construction and rates; residential tracks mortgage rates and housing turnover (starts fell 0.6% in 2025). Retrofit cushions but does not fully offset, and below Acuity's scale a single large project can swing a year [19][20][26][27].
• Value migration risk. Firms left selling bare hardware, rather than controls/software/brand, face structurally lower margins and growth — and connected products bring their own exposures: cybersecurity, privacy, interoperability, and software obsolescence [5].
• Regulatory reversal. Efficiency mandates are the demand engine in all three children; the incandescent phase-out has been politically contested and could be loosened or tightened, cutting both ways [5][12]. Mercury handling and end-of-life liabilities attach to the legacy fluorescent and HID base [14].
• Leverage. PE-owned platforms across all three children (especially residential) carry meaningful debt into rate-sensitive end markets [3].
• Fashion/inventory and channel disruption. Broad seasonal SKUs create obsolescence and working-capital drag; e-commerce, big-box buyer power, and retailer private label squeeze suppliers, and long product warranties leave field failures to surface years after the revenue [3][4].
• Perimeter error (an analyst risk, not an operating one). Both fixture children warn that the most common mistake in this space is treating a branded "lighting company," a published lighting-market forecast, and a NAICS code as interchangeable. They are not: corporate segments straddle several codes, Census measures domestic production rather than what Americans buy, and the 2022 renumbering breaks naïve historical series [4][5][7].

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10. How to invest and the outlook

Public routes (thin, and concentrated in one child).

• Direct: Acuity (NYSE: AYI) is the primary listed way to own U.S. lighting manufacturing and carries the controls/software upside; LSI (Nasdaq: LYTS) is the small-cap satellite and Orion (Nasdaq: OESX) the micro-cap, project-driven retrofit play; Signify (Euronext Amsterdam: LIGHT; OTC: SFFYY) is the global leader and the best proxy for the bulb business, though it is a foreign-listed turnaround with sales still declining [25][26][27][28]. All four sit mainly in 335132/335139.
• Adjacent/indirect: Griffon (GFF) for residential-décor ceiling fans; Energizer (ENR)/Newell (NWL) for portable lighting; home retailers (Home Depot, Lowe's, Williams-Sonoma, RH, Wayfair) for residential demand without factory risk — noting that several of them now design and source their own lighting and so compete vertically with the manufacturers; diversified electricals (Eaton, Hubbell, Legrand) and component names (ams OSRAM) for controls- and optics-adjacent exposure. There is no pure-play lighting ETF (exchange-traded fund) — broad exposure comes through industrials and building-products funds [3][4][37][38].

Private routes (where most of the industry actually lives). Private equity and families own the bulk of all three children, and the deal record shows sizable portfolios changing hands entirely outside public markets — Cooper at $1.4 billion, Hubbell's C&I lighting at roughly $333–350 million on ~$515 million of sales, Progress at $131 million on $187.1 million of revenue, Kichler at $125 million [29][30][34]. Openings: LP stakes and secondaries in the residential roll-up platforms (Visual Comfort, Coleto) and the commercial PE owners (Current/HLI Brands, Cree Lighting); buying or rolling up the long tail of regional fixture makers and rep agencies; owning ESCO/retrofit-service and lighting-as-a-service (LaaS) businesses that monetize the energy-savings stream; and backing controls/connected-lighting software and specialty (horticulture, UV-C, architectural/entertainment) niches where margins and growth concentrate [4][5][35][36].

For private diligence across any of the three, the most revealing items are the same: sales by brand, agent, and end market; specification win rates; backlog quality; price-cost timing; controls attach rate; sourced versus manufactured content and domestic-content eligibility; certification coverage; SKU-level inventory turns; warranty reserves; and customer and project concentration [4].

Outlook (forward-looking judgment). Expect a low-growth, cash-generative, consolidating level, with the three children diverging:

• Commercial (335132) — modest but positive, tracking low-single-digit non-residential construction into 2026 and led by data centers and warehouses; the durable story is value shifting from the fixture to the system (controls, connectivity, software), with two-thirds of commercial buildings still uncontrolled and roughly half of commercial sockets still fluorescent. The strongest, most investable child [9][11][19].
• Bulbs (335139) — mature and defensive, with a near-term fluorescent-to-LED tailwind from state bans and the July 2028 federal standard but a shrinking domestic base; growth only in connected and specialty. Largely a private/foreign game [12][13].
• Residential (335131) — cyclical and gated by mortgage rates near-term, with premiumization lifting prices and continued PE consolidation. Direct exposure remains private-market only [3][20].

The through-line for investors across all three: this is a branded, import-exposed, LED-shaped specialty-manufacturing industry where winners compete on design, specification relationships, sourcing scale, and a credible move up into controls and software — not on the cost of a U.S. factory floor. Tariffs remain a two-edged sword throughout: a cost and supply risk, and a competitive shield for domestic and branded players. And before underwriting any of it, rebuild the perimeter company by company — the federal code, the corporate segment, and the published market forecast are three different things [4][5].

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census — Concentration by Largest Firms and industry statistics, NAICS 33513 and its children 335131, 335132, 335139 (receipts, firm counts, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI). 2022. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns — establishments, employment, and payroll for NAICS 335131, 335132, 335139. 2023. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
3. Histometrics child primer, Residential Electric Lighting Fixture Manufacturing (NAICS 335131) — federal figures, tier/margin structure, ownership map, and PE roll-up dynamics.
4. Histometrics child primer, Commercial, Industrial, and Institutional Electric Lighting Fixture Manufacturing (NAICS 335132) — federal figures, specification channel, demand drivers, and consolidation.
5. Histometrics child primer, Electric Lamp Bulb and Other Lighting Equipment Manufacturing (NAICS 335139) — federal figures, LED longevity economics, foreign ownership, and specialty niches.
6. U.S. Small Business Administration. Table of Size Standards (335131 — 750 employees; 335132 — 600; 335139 — 1,250). 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
7. Federal Register / U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 NAICS revision and concordance (335121→335131; 335122→335132; 335110 + 335129→335139, with 335129 supplying 82% of firms and 74–75% of combined receipts and employment). 2022. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2022-07-05/pdf/2022-13250.pdf; https://thefederalregister.org/documents/2022-13250/small-business-size-standards-adoption-of-2022-north-american-industry-classification-system-for-size-standards
8. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2023 — NAICS 335100 Electric Lighting Equipment Manufacturing (38,190 jobs; $23.55 median hourly wage). 2023. https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/naics4_335100.htm
9. U.S. Department of Energy. 2020 U.S. Lighting Market Characterization (8.149B installed lamps and luminaires; ~48% LED vs 8% in 2015; 244 TWh ≈14% of U.S. electricity; 1.6B commercial installations; LED penetration by sector). 2024. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/ssl-lmc2020_apr24.pdf
10. U.S. Department of Energy. 2020 LED Manufacturing Supply Chain (89% U.S. value added in a domestically manufactured LED luminaire; Asian die/package concentration; Chinese dominance in LED lamps). 2020. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/ssl/articles/2020-led-manufacturing-supply-chain
11. U.S. Department of Energy. Optimization of Lighting Systems (two-thirds of commercial buildings have no control beyond a switch); Building Energy Codes determinations (ASHRAE 90.1-2022 ≈9.8% whole-building site-energy improvement). 2023. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/ssl/articles/optimization-lighting-systems; https://www.energycodes.gov/determinations
12. U.S. Department of Energy. LED Basics (30,000–50,000-hour LED life); Debunking Myths about Phasing Out the Incandescent Lightbulb (45 lm/W, effective August 2023); General Service Lamps (120+ lm/W, July 25, 2028 compliance date). 2023. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/ssl/led-basics; https://www.energy.gov/articles/debunking-myths-about-phasing-out-incandescent-lightbulb; https://www.energy.gov/cmei/buildings/general-service-lamps
13. Pacific Energy Concepts. Active List of U.S. States Banning Fluorescent Lights (state bans effective 2025, phasing through 2029). 2025. https://www.pecnw.com/blog/active-list-of-us-states-banning-fluorescent-lights/
14. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Frequent Questions on Lighting Equipment (universal-waste rules for spent mercury-containing lamps); ENERGY STAR Lighting Program (luminaires and lamps specifications sunset at the end of 2024). 2024. https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/hazard/web/html/faqs-5.html; https://www.energystar.gov/products/light_fixtures/partners
15. GREEN CREATIVE; California Energy Commission. California Title 24 / JA8 / Title 20 residential lighting standards. 2024/2025. https://greencreative.com/lighting-academy/lighting-standards/california-title-24-ja8-title-20/
16. UL Solutions; DesignLights Consortium. Lighting safety standards (UL 1598, UL 153, UL 8750); DLC Qualified Products Lists required by ~700 utility and efficiency programs. 2025. https://www.ul.com/industries/products-and-components/lighting/residential-and-consumer-lighting; https://designlights.org/fact-sheet/
17. Eightx. Lighting imports (HS 9405): the 2026 China tariff map — U.S. imports ~$9.17B (2024); China ~37%, down from ~46% in 2022. 2026. https://eightx.co/blog/lighting-import-origins
18. inside.lighting; White & Case LLP. Section 301 tariffs on Chinese lighting imports (base MFN duty ~3.9% + 25%; total burdens ~30–50%+); China produces ~90% of the world's LED bulbs with no U.S. bulb manufacturing at scale. 2024–2025. https://inside.lighting/news/25-04/no-leds-are-not-exempt-china-tariffs; https://inside.lighting/news/25-04/lighting-industry-rattled-us-china-tariffs-hit-104; https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/united-states-finalizes-section-301-tariff-increases-imports-china
19. American Institute of Architects / inside.lighting. Consensus Construction Forecast — non-residential building spending ~1.7% (2025), 1–2% (2026); data centers surging, offices shrinking. 2025. https://inside.lighting/news/25-07/12-insights-construction-economists-2025-26-outlook
20. U.S. Census Bureau / HUD. New Residential Construction, December 2025 (1.359M housing starts in 2025, 0.6% below 2024). 2025. https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/pdf/newresconst_202512.pdf
21. IBISWorld. Lighting Fixture Manufacturing in the US — ~$15.2B of 2025 revenue across residential plus commercial/industrial fixtures. 2025/2026. https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/lighting-fixture-manufacturing/781/
22. Research and Markets / BusinessWire; Research and Markets / GlobeNewswire. United States Lighting Fixtures Market Report 2025 (~$20B, import-dependent); United States LED Lighting Market (~$11.8B in 2024). 2025. https://markets.financialcontent.com/clarkebroadcasting.mymotherlode/article/bizwire-2025-8-18-united-states-lighting-fixtures-market-report-2025; https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/09/26/3157130/28124/en/united-states-led-lighting-market-growth-analysis-and-forecast-trends-report-2025-2034-featuring-signify-ams-osram-eaton-acuity-brands-smart-global-ge-lighting-and-hubbell.html
23. SkyQuest Technology. Smart Lighting Market Size ($21.71B in 2024, ~20% CAGR). 2024. https://www.skyquestt.com/report/smart-lighting-market
24. U.S. International Trade Commission. U.S. Light Fixture Manufacturing in the LED Illumination Era (2017 residential narrow-industry shipments ~$1.5B; top-4 71% of residential receipts; SMEs 98% of firms / 52% of employment / 39% of receipts; U.S. fixture demand >$18B in 2018; residential fixture imports +43%, 2010–2019). 2019. https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/ebot_light_fixtures.pdf
25. Acuity Inc. Form 10-K, fiscal year ended August 31, 2025, and fiscal 2025 fourth-quarter results (total revenue ~$4.3B; lighting segment $3,612.2M at 45.8% gross and 16.4% operating margin; channel, input costs, and roughly equal new-construction and renovation addressable markets). 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1144215/000114421525000082/ayi-20250831.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1144215/000114421525000076/ayi-20251001x8xk_ex991.htm
26. LSI Industries Inc. Form 10-K and fiscal 2025 results (net sales $573.4M; lighting $248.4M; ~12% lighting operating margin; lighting sales down 5% on non-recurring prior-year projects). 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/763532/000143774925028862/lyts20250630_10k.htm
27. Orion Energy Systems. Form 10-K and fiscal 2025 results (LED-lighting revenue $47.7M, down 22%; 26.6% lighting gross margin; turnkey retrofit model). 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1409375/000095017025090385/oesx-20250331.htm
28. Signify N.V. Full-year 2025 sales of €5.8B; fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 results (€6.1B sales, ~$2.2B U.S., 144 million connected light points, LED 93% of sales); Annual Report 2025 (segment margins 4.8%–16.1%; "predictable structural decline" in Conventional lighting). 2025–2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/signify-reports-full-2025-sales-060000177.html; https://www.signify.com/global/our-company/news/press-releases/2025/20250124-signify-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-results-2024; https://www.signify.com/static/2025/signify-annual-report-2025.pdf
29. Signify / Cooper Lighting. Eaton sells Cooper Lighting Solutions to Signify for $1.4 billion (completed 2020). 2020. https://business-news-today.com/signify-acquires-cooper-lighting-solutions/; https://www.cooperlighting.com/global/resources/press-releases/signify-successfully-completes-acquisition-of-cooper-lighting
30. Hubbell Incorporated; Current (HLI Brands) / American Industrial Partners; GE News. Hubbell sells commercial and industrial lighting (~$515M of 2020 sales) to GE Current — $332.8M per the completion release, $350M per Hubbell's FY2021 Form 10-K; American Industrial Partners acquires Current from GE (2019). 2019–2022. https://hubbell.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hubbell-completes-sale-commercial-and-industrial-lighting; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/48898/000162828022002255/hubb-20211231.htm; https://www.currentlighting.com/newsroom/ge-current-daintree-company-completes-acquisition-of-hubbell-commercial-industrial-lighting; https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/american-industrial-partners-completes-acquisition-current-powered-ge
31. GE News / WKYC. GE sells its lighting business to Savant Systems (2020); GE Lighting closes its last U.S. bulb and glass plants at Bucyrus and Logan, Ohio (2022). 2020–2022. https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/ge-sell-lighting-business-savant-systems-inc
32. LEDVANCE; Wikipedia. Ledvance (the former Osram lamp business) wholly owned by MLS Co. of China since 2018; Sylvania lamps under Shanghai Feilo. 2024. https://ledvance.com/en-us/company/about-ledvance; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havells_Sylvania
33. inside.lighting / Wolfspeed. IDEAL Industries sells Cree Lighting to CLNA Holdings / the ADLT family (2023); Cree had sold Cree Lighting to IDEAL in 2019. 2019/2023. https://inside.lighting/news/23-09/ideal-industries-sells-cree-lighting
34. inside.lighting; Hubbell Incorporated; Masco Corporation. Hubbell completes sale of Progress Lighting ($131M on $187.1M of 2023 revenue, ~0.70× trailing sales); Kichler sold to private equity for $125M net of cash, on which Masco recorded an $88M loss. 2024–2025. https://inside.lighting/news/24-02/hubbell-completes-sale-progress-lighting; https://inside.lighting/news/24-09/kichler-lighting-sold-private-equity-firm-125-million; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/48898/000162828025005311/hubb-20241231.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/62996/000006299625000004/mas-20241231.htm
35. Kingswood Capital Management. Acquisition of Kichler Lighting and merger with Progress Lighting to form Coleto Brands. 2024. https://www.kingswood-capital.com/kingswood-capital-management-announces-acquisition-of-kichler-lighting-and-merger-with-progress-lighting-to-establish-a-leading-residential-lighting-platform/
36. AEA Investors. Acquisition of Visual Comfort and business combination with Generation Brands (premium/designer residential platform). 2017/2021. https://www.aeainvestors.com/aea-announces-acquisition-of-visual-comfort-and-business-combination-with-generation-brands/
37. Industrial Distribution / Griffon Corp. Griffon's Ames subsidiary acquires Hunter Fan Company for $845M. 2022. https://www.inddist.com/mergers-acquisitions/news/21965053/griffon-corps-ames-subsidiary-buying-hunter-fan-company-for-845m
38. GlobalGrowthInsights. Top Flashlight Companies — portable-lighting lines (flashlights, Coleman lanterns) within diversified consumer firms. 2024. https://www.globalgrowthinsights.com/blog/flashlight-companies-1099
39. LED Professional. Acuity acquires the ams OSRAM Digital Systems business in North America; Acuity's ~$1.2B acquisition of controls firm QSC. 2025. https://www.led-professional.com/all/acuity-brands-acquires-the-ams-osram-digital-systems-business-in-north-america