Electric Lamp Bulb and Other Lighting Equipment Manufacturing (NAICS 335139)

A Histometrics industry primer for public- and private-market investors

1. Overview

This industry makes the things that produce light: light bulbs and lamps (now overwhelmingly LED — light-emitting diode), plus a grab-bag of "other lighting equipment" like flashlights, lanterns, street-lighting fixtures, spotlights, and Christmas light strings.[1] It sits at the intersection of two very different businesses — a mature, commoditized consumables business (bulbs) and a slower-growing hardware business (portable and specialty lighting).

Why an investor should care, and why with caution: light is a universal, non-cyclical need, but the economics here were upended by the LED transition. Good-quality white LEDs last 30,000–50,000 hours versus roughly 1,000 for the incandescent bulbs they replaced, which permanently gutted the old razor-and-blades replacement cycle even as it created a one-time retrofit boom.[8][19] The result is a shrinking, import-dominated domestic manufacturing base with thin margins, where the money increasingly moves to software, connectivity, and specialty niches rather than the glass-and-filament core.

Ways in differ sharply by investor type. For public-market investors there is effectively no U.S.-listed pure play on this code — exposure comes through diversified or foreign-listed proxies (covered in Section 4). For private investors, this is largely a private and foreign-owned industry: family firms, private-equity-backed brands, and Chinese conglomerates own most of the domestic name plates, so direct ownership, buyouts, and distribution roll-ups are the realistic routes.

2. What it is and how it's structured

In scope (335139): electric light bulbs, tubes and parts; LED light bulbs (the finished lamp); flashlights, lanterns and spotlights; street-lighting fixtures; nonelectric lighting (e.g., gas-log and camping lighting); insect lamps; and holiday light sets.[1]

Explicitly excluded — and this matters for sizing the industry:

• Residential lighting fixtures → NAICS 335131.[1]
• Commercial, industrial, and institutional lighting fixtures → NAICS 335132. This is where the large architectural-lighting companies (Acuity, Hubbell's lighting lines, Cooper) mostly sit — not here.[1]
• Vehicular lighting → motor-vehicle parts codes.[1]
• The LED chip/diode itself and glass blanks → semiconductor manufacturing (334413) and glass manufacturing (32721), respectively.[1] So a maker of the LED bulb is in 335139; the maker of the LED chip inside it is not.
• Signaling devices (traffic and railway signals) → 334290.[1]

The practical way to read 335139: it is the "bulbs plus everyday and specialty lighting gear" slice, not the whole lighting economy. The big-ticket fixture industry lives next door in 335131/335132.

A note on code history: NAICS 335139 is new to the 2022 revision. Census combined former industry 335110 (Electric Lamp Bulb and Part Manufacturing) with 335129 (Other Lighting Equipment Manufacturing); SBA reported that the latter supplied 82% of the firms and 74–75% of combined receipts and employment in the merged industry.[20] Consequently, a simple historical series labeled "335139" does not exist before 2022; older analyses must reconstruct it from both predecessor codes.

Ownership mix: a small domestic manufacturing footprint, heavily foreign-owned and private. The legacy American brands have all changed hands — GE Lighting is owned by Savant Systems (acquired 2020); Sylvania's lamp business by China's Shanghai Feilo; the former Osram lamp business (Ledvance) by a Chinese consortium led by MLS Co. (sole owner since 2018).[13][15][22] GE's commercial and industrial lighting business, Current, was sold to American Industrial Partners in 2019 and remains privately held.[23] Signify acquired Cooper Lighting in 2020, consolidating another major brand under the Dutch parent.[21] Independent U.S. players (Satco/Nuvo, Feit Electric, TCP, MaxLite) are privately held. Publicly traded ownership is thin and indirect.

3. How big it is

Federal statistics for the U.S. establishments in this code (our ground-truth figures):

Concentration is moderate and rising up the ladder: the top 4 firms hold 38.1% of receipts, the top 8 hold 52.4%, the top 20 hold 71.2%, and the top 50 hold 86.4%.[3] (The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index — a standard concentration measure — is suppressed in the federal data, so we do not report it.[3])

The undercount that matters here is the reverse of most industries. These figures measure lighting manufactured in the United States, which is only a sliver of the lighting Americans actually buy. The U.S. LED-lighting market alone was roughly $11.8 billion in 2024 — more than double this code's total domestic shipments — because an estimated ~90% of LED bulbs are imported, mostly from China.[5][12] DOE's LED manufacturing supply-chain study found LED-die and package manufacturing concentrated in Asia, and LED-lamp manufacturing dominated by China; in contrast, customized luminaire manufacturing is more geographically distributed, with DOE attributing 89% of the value added in a domestically manufactured LED luminaire to the United States.[24] Domestic lamp production has been shrinking for two decades; Savant closed GE Lighting's last U.S. bulb and glass plants (Bucyrus and Logan, Ohio) in 2022, ending American-made GE bulbs.[13] So read the federal numbers as "what's left of U.S. lighting manufacturing," not "the size of the lighting business in America."

4. The investable universe

There is no clean, U.S.-listed pure play on NAICS 335139. Every public name below is either a diversified company where lighting is one segment, a foreign listing, or a fixture/component maker that technically sits in an adjacent code. The table separates the closest proxies from the adjacent and component plays. Revenue figures are total company (spanning many product codes and geographies), not 335139-specific.

Major private and foreign owners (the real backbone of the domestic industry): GE Lighting (Savant Systems, private); Current (American Industrial Partners, private)[23]; Feit Electric (family-owned); Satco/Nuvo (private); TCP, MaxLite, Green Creative (private); Ledvance (MLS Co., China-listed); Sylvania lamps (Shanghai Feilo); and the vast Chinese manufacturing cluster around Zhongshan, Guangdong that produces most of the world's bulbs.[12][13][15]

Bottom line for public investors: to "own the lighting bulb business" you are really buying Signify, or accepting diluted exposure inside a diversified electrical or consumer-products company.

5. How the money works

This is a manufacturing business, so the classic manufacturing levers apply — capacity utilization, input costs, and cyclicality — but overlaid with one defining twist: LED-driven demand destruction.

• The longevity paradox. Because an LED lamp lasts 30–50× longer than an incandescent, the industry sold a huge one-time wave of retrofit units and then faces a permanently smaller replacement market.[19] Unit volumes for commodity bulbs are structurally flat-to-declining in developed markets. Owners fight this by (a) capturing the fluorescent-to-LED replacement wave still underway, (b) raising average selling price (ASP) with smart and specialty features, and (c) shifting toward recurring software/service revenue. Signify describes its Conventional lighting segment as undergoing "predictable structural decline."[25]
• Gross margin by mix. Commodity screw-in bulbs are low-margin and price-competitive against Chinese imports; margins live in specialty and connected products — horticulture ("grow") lights, ultraviolet (UV) disinfection, human-centric/tunable lighting, and connected systems like Philips Hue, where a subscription and app layer sits on top of the hardware.[13] For reference, Signify reported 2025 segment margins ranging from 4.8% in OEM components to 16.1% in Conventional lighting — evidence that a declining legacy category can remain profitable after capacity rationalization, while more competitive electronic components can earn less.[25]
• Input costs. The bill of materials is LED chips/packages, electronic drivers, aluminum and plastic housings, and (for legacy lamps) glass and rare-earth phosphors. Semiconductor and metals pricing, plus freight and tariffs, drive the cost line.[12]
• Channels. Consumer bulbs move through big-box retail and Amazon (brand and shelf space matter); commercial and municipal product moves through electrical distributors on a specification/project basis, where relationships and rebate qualification matter more than shelf price.
• Capacity and imports. With ~90% of bulbs imported, domestic "manufacturing" for many brands is really assembly, testing, distribution, and branding around imported components — so the economics look more like a sourcing-and-logistics business than heavy manufacturing.[12] The move up-value is toward lighting-as-a-service (LaaS), where the owner keeps the fixtures and sells illumination and energy savings on a contract.

6. What drives demand

• Construction and renovation cycles — new residential and non-residential building creates first-fit demand; remodeling drives replacement. This is the cyclical backbone.[5]
• Energy-efficiency regulation and utility rebates — efficiency mandates and rebate dollars pull buyers toward LEDs and pull fluorescent/incandescent out of the market (Section 7).[8][9]
• Replacement demand — still exists, but structurally reduced by LED lifespans.
• The fluorescent phase-out — the current near-term tailwind: state bans and coming federal standards are forcing a large installed base of fluorescent tubes to convert to LED (Section 7).[9]
• Smart-home and IoT adoption — the connected-lighting market (~$21.7 billion globally in 2024, growing ~20% a year) is the industry's fastest-growing pocket and the main ASP and margin story.[14] Signify reported its installed base had reached 144 million connected light points by year-end 2024.[6]
• Municipal / smart-city street-lighting conversions — cities swapping high-pressure-sodium street lamps for connected LEDs.[14]
• Specialty niches — indoor agriculture/horticulture, UV-C disinfection, architectural and entertainment lighting, and automotive-adjacent lighting.
• Electricity prices — higher power costs shorten LED payback periods and accelerate upgrades.[8]
• The LED conversion tailwind (finite). DOE estimated that residential and commercial buildings contained 8.149 billion installed lamps and luminaires in 2020, with LEDs representing roughly 48% of the installed base versus 8% in 2015 and 1% in 2010; those sectors used 244 TWh for lighting in 2020, approximately 14% of U.S. electricity consumption.[26] Conversion demand remains available in fluorescent-heavy commercial buildings, outdoor infrastructure, and specialty applications — but once conversion matures, far fewer replacement bulbs are needed.

7. Regulation

Regulation is unusually central here — it is both the industry's biggest tailwind (forcing LED adoption) and a source of political and compliance risk.

• DOE efficiency standards. Under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) enforced a 45-lumens-per-watt minimum (a lumen is a unit of light output) beginning August 2023, which effectively banned the sale of traditional incandescent and most halogen bulbs.[8] A further increase to more than 120 lumens per watt takes effect July 25, 2028, which would eliminate compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) as well.[9][27] Note: these rules apply to defined general-service lamps and contain exclusions for certain specialty lamps.
• State fluorescent bans. California, Vermont, Colorado, Oregon, Rhode Island and others have banned the sale of mercury-containing fluorescent tubes and CFLs on staggered dates (many effective 2025), with more states (Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, New York) phasing in through 2029.[9] These are driven by mercury-toxicity concerns under the global Minamata Convention on Mercury.
• Mercury and end-of-life handling. EPA classifies many spent fluorescent, HID, mercury-vapor, high-pressure-sodium, and metal-halide lamps under universal-waste rules, with additional state requirements possible.[28] Fluorescent and HID products carry mercury-handling and end-of-life liabilities.
• Labeling and safety. Energy Star (efficiency labeling), the FTC "Lighting Facts" label, UL safety certification, FCC rules for connected/wireless products, and RoHS (restriction of hazardous substances) all apply.
• Trade policy. Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods — which escalated sharply in 2025 — hit an industry that sources ~90% of bulbs from China, raising landed costs and pressuring margins without meaningfully reshoring production.[12]

Note the political dimension: the incandescent phase-out has been contested and could be loosened or tightened by future administrations, a genuine (if second-order) risk to demand mix.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The last decade was a wholesale changing of the guard as Western giants exited the commoditizing lamp business:

• GE sold its consumer lighting business to Savant Systems (2020) and closed its last U.S. lamp plants (2022); its commercial lighting unit, Current, was sold to American Industrial Partners (2019).[13][23]
• Philips spun off its lighting arm as Signify (2016–2018), which remains the largest Western player and has pivoted hard toward connected lighting and services; Signify acquired Cooper Lighting in 2020, consolidating another major brand.[6][21]
• Osram spun off its lamp business as Ledvance (2016), sold to a Chinese consortium; MLS became sole owner in 2018; the remaining ams OSRAM has repositioned around optical semiconductors.[15][16][22]
• Cree exited lighting entirely — Cree Lighting to Ideal Industries (2019), Cree LED chips to what is now Penguin Solutions (2021).[18]
• Hubbell sold its commercial and industrial lighting operation to Current for $350 million in 2022 (though that business was primarily adjacent NAICS 335132).[29]

Two structural forces dominate: Chinese manufacturing dominance (roughly 90% of world bulb output, an entrenched cost advantage that reshoring cannot easily beat[12]), and commoditization of the LED lamp, which compresses margins and pushes survivors either toward scale/low cost or up-market into controls, software, and systems. Recent deals show the up-market move — Acuity's ~$1.2 billion purchase of audio-visual-controls firm QSC and its acquisition of ams OSRAM's North American Digital Systems business, both aimed at owning the "smart building" layer rather than competing on bulbs.[18]

9. Risks

• Structural demand destruction. LED longevity permanently shrinks replacement volume — the core headwind that no amount of marketing fully offsets.
• Commoditization and price competition. Chinese scale sets the floor price on bulbs; Western manufacturers cannot win on cost.[12]
• Tariff and supply-chain concentration. ~90% China sourcing means trade policy directly whipsaws costs and availability; supplier concentration can be acute in semiconductors, drivers, or specialty components.[12]
• Cyclicality. Tied to construction and renovation spending; a building downturn hits first-fit demand.
• Regulatory reversal. Efficiency mandates are the demand engine; political rollback (or, conversely, compliance cost from new bans) cuts both ways.[8]
• Technology and IP risk. LED is mature; next-gen contenders (MicroLED, OLED lighting, LiFi) could reshuffle economics, and patent litigation (e.g., LED filament patents) is active.
• Margin thinness. For pure commodity players, low returns leave little cushion for input-cost shocks.
• Substitution risk. Long-lived integrated LED fixtures eliminate replaceable bulbs altogether; smart switches and centralized controls can compete with smart bulbs; rapid efficacy and feature improvements can strand inventory.
• Connected-product risks. Smart lighting adds cybersecurity, privacy, interoperability, and software-obsolescence risks.

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public routes. Accept that there is no pure play. The best single proxy is Signify (Amsterdam: LIGHT / OTC: SFFYY) — the largest Western lamp-and-connected-lighting company with substantial U.S. sales; LED-based products represented 93% of its 2024 sales.[6] More diluted exposure comes through ams OSRAM (optics + legacy lamps), Energizer and Newell (in-scope portable lighting inside diversified consumer companies), and the adjacent fixture names — Acuity (AYI), Hubbell (HUBB), LSI (LYTS), Orion (OESX), Dialight (DIA.L) — which most investors think of as "lighting" but sit in codes 335131/335132.[7][17] Component/tangential plays include Universal Display (OLED) and Penguin Solutions (PENG). For any of these, reserve valuation-multiple and dividend analysis for the specific segment mix, since lighting is rarely the whole company.

Private routes. This is fundamentally a private-market industry. The domestic name plates — GE Lighting (Savant), Current (AIP), Feit, Satco/Nuvo, TCP, MaxLite — are privately or foreign-held, so ownership comes via buyouts, distribution and rep-agency roll-ups, or direct investment in specialty niches with real pricing power: horticulture lighting, UV-C, architectural/entertainment, and connected-lighting software startups. The recurring-revenue and lighting-as-a-service models are where private capital is most active.

A note on perimeter. The most important investment misconception is to treat a branded "lighting company," a lighting-market forecast, and NAICS 335139 as interchangeable. They are not. Corporate segments cross several NAICS codes; Census measures domestic manufacturing, not imported product sold in the United States; DOE market studies often cover lamps and fixtures together; and the new 335139 code breaks naïve historical comparisons. Any valuation or market-share exercise should first rebuild the product and geographic perimeter company by company.

Near-term drivers (forward-looking). The retrofit wave that carried the last decade is largely spent in developed markets, so expect low-single-digit growth in commodity bulbs and continued margin pressure and consolidation. The identifiable near-term tailwind is the fluorescent-to-LED conversion forced by state bans and the July 2028 federal standard, which pulls a large installed base of tubes into replacement.[9][27] The identifiable growth engine is connected/smart and specialty lighting (~20% annual growth globally), where value shifts from the bulb to the app, the data, and the service.[14] Tariffs will keep reshuffling sourcing across Southeast Asia but are unlikely to reshore bulb manufacturing at scale.[12] Net: a mature, defensive, low-growth core with genuine but concentrated growth in the smart and specialty layers on top.

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Sources

1. NAICS Association / U.S. Census Bureau. "NAICS 2022 — 335139 Electric Lamp Bulb and Other Lighting Equipment Manufacturing." 2022. https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?v=2022&code=335139
2. U.S. Census Bureau. "County Business Patterns (CBP), NAICS 335139." 2023. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
3. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 Economic Census — Concentration Ratios and Industry Statistics, NAICS 335139." 2022. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
4. U.S. Small Business Administration. "Table of Size Standards." 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
5. Research and Markets (via GlobeNewswire). "United States LED Lighting Market Growth Analysis and Forecast Trends Report 2025-2034." 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
6. Signify N.V. "Fourth-quarter and full-year results 2024." 2025. https://www.signify.com/global/our-company/news/press-releases/2025/20250124-signify-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-results-2024
7. Acuity Brands, Inc. "Acuity Brands Reports Fiscal 2024 Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year Results." 2024. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/10/01/2955885/28689/en/Acuity-Brands-Reports-Fiscal-2024-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-Results.html
8. U.S. Department of Energy. "Debunking Myths about Phasing Out the Incandescent Lightbulb" (45 lumens-per-watt standard, effective August 2023). 2023. https://www.energy.gov/articles/debunking-myths-about-phasing-out-incandescent-lightbulb
9. Pacific Energy Concepts. "Active List of U.S. States Banning Fluorescent Lights" (state bans + DOE 2028 120 lm/W standard). 2025. https://www.pecnw.com/blog/active-list-of-us-states-banning-fluorescent-lights/
10. OLED-Info. "Universal Display reports its financial results for Q4 2024" ($647.7M FY2024 revenue). 2025. https://www.oled-info.com/universal-display-reports-its-financial-results-q4-2024
11. GlobalGrowthInsights. "Top Flashlight Companies" (Energizer portable-lighting market position). 2024. https://www.globalgrowthinsights.com/blog/flashlight-companies-1099
12. Inside.Lighting / JC-LGL. "Lighting Rattled as U.S.-China Tariffs Hit; China produces ~90% of world LED bulbs; no domestic LED bulb manufacturing at scale." 2025. https://inside.lighting/news/25-04/lighting-industry-rattled-us-china-tariffs-hit-104
13. GE News / WKYC. "GE to Sell Lighting Business to Savant Systems" (2020) and "GE Lighting to close two Ohio plants" (Bucyrus/Logan, 2022). 2020–2022. https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/ge-sell-lighting-business-savant-systems-inc
14. SkyQuest Technology. "Smart Lighting Market Size" ($21.71B in 2024, ~20% CAGR). 2024. https://www.skyquestt.com/report/smart-lighting-market
15. Wikipedia. "Havells Sylvania" and Ledvance/Osram lamp spin-off and Chinese-consortium ownership. 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havells_Sylvania
16. ams OSRAM AG. "ams OSRAM Reports Q4 2024 Financial Results" (€3.4B FY2024 revenue). 2025. https://ams-osram.com/news/press-releases/q4-2024-results
17. Hubbell Incorporated. "Form 10-K, FY2024" (Electrical Solutions segment ~$2.0B). 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/48898/000162828025005311/hubb-20241231.htm
18. LED Professional. "Acuity Brands Acquires the ams OSRAM Digital Systems Business in North America" (and Cree LED under Penguin Solutions). 2025. https://www.led-professional.com/all/acuity-brands-acquires-the-ams-osram-digital-systems-business-in-north-america
19. U.S. Department of Energy. "LED Basics" (30,000–50,000 hour LED lifespan). https://www.energy.gov/cmei/ssl/led-basics
20. Federal Register. "Small Business Size Standards: Adoption of 2022 North American Industry Classification System for Size Standards" (NAICS 335139 formed from 335110 + 335129). 2022. https://thefederalregister.org/documents/2022-13250/small-business-size-standards-adoption-of-2022-north-american-industry-classification-system-for-size-standards
21. Cooper Lighting. "Signify Successfully Completes Acquisition of Cooper Lighting." 2020. https://www.cooperlighting.com/global/resources/press-releases/signify-successfully-completes-acquisition-of-cooper-lighting
22. LEDVANCE. "About LEDVANCE" (MLS became sole owner in 2018). https://ledvance.com/en-us/company/about-ledvance
23. GE News. "American Industrial Partners Completes Acquisition of Current, powered by GE." 2019. https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/american-industrial-partners-completes-acquisition-current-powered-ge
24. U.S. Department of Energy. "2020 LED Manufacturing Supply Chain." 2020. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/ssl/articles/2020-led-manufacturing-supply-chain
25. Signify N.V. "Annual Report 2025." 2025. https://www.signify.com/static/2025/signify-annual-report-2025.pdf
26. U.S. Department of Energy. "2020 Lighting Market Characterization" (8.149B installed lamps, 48% LED penetration, 244 TWh). 2024. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/ssl-lmc2020_apr24.pdf
27. U.S. Department of Energy. "General Service Lamps" (July 25, 2028 compliance date for 120+ lm/W standard). https://www.energy.gov/cmei/buildings/general-service-lamps
28. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Frequent Questions on Lighting Equipment" (universal waste rules for spent lamps). https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/hazard/web/html/faqs-5.html
29. Hubbell Incorporated. "Form 10-K, FY2021" (sale of C&I lighting to Current for $350M). 2022. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/48898/000162828022002255/hubb-20211231.htm