Russia's Onexim forms LED lighting joint venture

LONDON — Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (Rusnano), Onexim Group Ltd. and the Ural Optical and Mechanical Plant have agreed to form a joint venture to produce lighting systems based on gallium nitride LEDs.

The agreement was signed by Anatoly Chubais, general director of Rusnano, Mikhail Prokhorov, president of Onexim and Sergey Maksin, general director of the UOMP on Dec. 3 in Moscow. Onexim has also acquired for an unknown sum of money a controlling interest in Optogan Oy (Helsinki, Finland), a startup developing GaN LEDs founded by two Russian physicists.

The Russian joint venture is set to produce new generation lighting systems based on gallium nitride semiconductor chips. Record low amounts of defects in the semiconductor layers will allow the devices to work without losing effectiveness with high-density currents, enabling a good brightness to price ratio for LED chips, according to Onexim Group.

The chip production technology was created by Vladislav Bugrov and Maxim Odnoblyudov, the founders of Optogan. Onexim's stake in the venture will be 50 percent plus one share, Rusnano's is 17 percent and UOMP's share will be 33 percent minus one share.

The production of heterostructure LED semiconductors will take place in Saint-Petersburg. The production of LED chips and the assembly of lamps and lighting products will be located at Yekaterinburg, at the site of the lighting products subdivision of UOMP, Onexim said.

The world market of LED lighting products is growing at 37 percent per year and LED lamps occupy already at least 3.5 percent of the Russian lighting systems market. The world market for LEDs was $4.2 billion in 2007 and is forecasted to reach $12 billion in 2012 growing at an average annual rate of 23 percent.

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