Foshan Electrical and Lighting Co., Ltd.
On March 1, 2025, Foshan Electrical and Lighting Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Foshan Lighting") and China Railway Shanghai Design Institute Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "China Railway Shanghai Institute") held a signing and unveiling ceremony for the Joint Innovation Center for Smart Rail Transit Lighting at the Foshan Lighting Tower. This initiative not only marks deep collaboration between the two parties in the fields of intelligence, health, green technology, low-carbon solutions, energy efficiency, and safety but also signals a new wave of technological innovation and business transformation in China's rail transit lighting industry.
Liu Jianhong, Party Secretary and Chairman of China Railway Shanghai Institute, emphasized that differentiated competitiveness stems from "breaking boundaries" thinking. He expressed hope that both parties would fully leverage their strengths, using technological innovation as the foundation and systematic solutions as the approach to achieve deep cross-industry integration. This would accelerate the transformation of scientific research into industrial applications, ensuring solid progress on the path to high-quality development. Wan Shan, Party Secretary and Chairman of Foshan Lighting, stated that this cooperation agreement presents an opportunity for Foshan Lighting to enhance the depth and breadth of its technological innovation by using projects as a foundation, talent as support, and mechanisms as drivers. The company aims to accelerate the development of new productive forces and actively promote high-level technological self-sufficiency.
Both parties will adhere to the principles of "complementary advantages, resource sharing, and collaborative innovation" to leverage their extensive resources and expertise in rail transit lighting. They will focus on intelligence, health, green technology, low-carbon solutions, energy efficiency, safety, and energy utilization to establish a collaborative innovation platform integrating technological breakthroughs, industrial application, standard development, and talent training. This platform will create a robust cooperation mechanism, expand lighting application scenarios, and accelerate the industrialization of rail transit lighting technologies and the implementation of major projects. By doing so, they aim to contribute to the high-quality development of the industry, foster new productive forces, and support China’s national strategy of becoming a strong transportation power through the collaboration of central and state-owned enterprises.
A Collaborative Innovation Platform for Smart Rail Transit Lighting
The core objective of the Joint Innovation Center is to build a platform centered on collaborative innovation. From the perspective of lighting industry development, the increasing complexity of urban rail transit environments and safety requirements calls for an upgrade and application of smart lighting technologies. Through this partnership, the two companies aim to gradually transform rail transit lighting technologies into practical applications, laying the foundation for the implementation of major future projects.
Smart technology is an essential aspect of this initiative. Intelligent lighting systems can dynamically sense the environment, automatically adjusting brightness and color temperature to enhance passenger comfort and safety. Additionally, health-centric lighting is gaining attention, as it can regulate light spectra to improve passengers’ physiological and psychological well-being, creating a more pleasant travel experience.
The principles of green and low-carbon design will be consistently upheld. The adoption of energy-efficient LED technology will significantly reduce energy consumption and operational costs. As an industry leader, Foshan Lighting’s advanced lighting products stand out in rail transit systems, offering both economic benefits and ecological advantages that contribute to the sustainable development of urban rail transit.
More importantly, this collaboration will drive cutting-edge innovations in lighting technology. By integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as computer vision and real-time data analysis, future rail transit lighting systems will become increasingly intelligent. AI-powered lighting systems can monitor passenger traffic in real time and adjust lighting accordingly, ensuring both safety and convenience.
Smart Lighting: A Modernized Approach to Rail Transit Operations
The integration of smart lighting marks a modernization breakthrough in rail transit operations management. Traditional, rigid lighting management models are no longer sufficient for rapidly evolving urban environments. With the resource-sharing and technological support of the Joint Innovation Center, Foshan Lighting and China Railway Shanghai Institute will foster a strong innovation ecosystem, broadening the application scenarios of rail transit lighting.
However, as the industry undergoes transformation and innovation, challenges and concerns must also be addressed. For instance, data security and privacy protection are critical considerations in AI applications. While advancing technology, it is essential to safeguard passenger information and usage data, ensuring responsible and ethical applications of smart technologies.
Shaping the Future of Smart, Green, and Healthy Lighting
The collaboration between Foshan Lighting and China Railway Shanghai Institute is not only a technological exploration of smart rail transit lighting but also a significant step toward promoting the lighting industry’s development in a smarter, greener, and healthier direction. Looking ahead, more groundbreaking innovations are expected to emerge as key projects are implemented and strategic collaborations deepen. This will inject new momentum into China’s rail transit development while offering new insights and benchmarks for the global lighting industry.
For smart rail transit lighting, this partnership is expected to bring revolutionary solutions that could achieve major breakthroughs in energy efficiency, intelligent control, and passenger experience enhancement. From an industry perspective, this cross-sector collaboration sets a valuable example within the dual contexts of China’s "dual-carbon" goals and smart city development. In the future, lighting manufacturers may find opportunities not only in rail transit but also in other industries, where technological integration can open up new application scenarios and drive the overall advancement of the lighting industry.
Foshan Electrical and Lighting Co., Ltd. (Foshan Lighting) has reached a comprehensive cooperation agreement with the IoT Division of Alibaba Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. (“Alibaba Cloud Intelligence IoT”). Foshan Lighting will leverage Alibaba Cloud’s Living IoT Platform (hereinafter referred to as the "Feiyan Platform") and its ecosystem service resources to build an intelligent product/application/service ecosystem focused on the lighting and electrical industry. Over the next year, the company plans to launch more than 2 million smart devices on this platform to jointly explore domestic and international smart lighting markets.
As the No. 1 cloud computing service provider in the Asia-Pacific region and the third globally, Alibaba Cloud has developed general industry PaaS services tailored to various vertical industries. In the IoT sector, Alibaba Cloud has established the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence IoT Division, which has launched a series of AIoT smart networking service products across smart living, smart cities, smart communities, and smart manufacturing. This partnership will specifically focus on Alibaba Cloud’s AIoT smart living industry PaaS product—the Living IoT Platform (Feiyan Platform).
Foshan Lighting is a leading lighting brand in China with strong comprehensive competitiveness. The company operates over 50,000 retail outlets and more than 1,500 home specialty stores domestically, exporting approximately 40% of its products to more than 110 countries and regions worldwide. Additionally, Foshan Lighting actively develops independent FSL brand sales channels in international markets, establishing itself as a globally influential electrical lighting brand. In recent years, Foshan Lighting has continuously increased its strategic investments in smart lighting and healthy lighting solutions.
For its digital transformation, Foshan Lighting has chosen the Alibaba Cloud Feiyan Platform. Feiyan is an intelligent networking platform designed for smart home applications, enabling devices to be rapidly and cost-effectively connected to the cloud. Currently, the platform has surpassed 100 million connected devices, covering over 200 countries, 119 categories, and more than 2,000 SKUs, with collaborations involving over 500 brands.
Moreover, Feiyan Platform not only provides comprehensive AIoT smart features but also offers a leading application ecosystem development environment in China. This was a key factor in Foshan Lighting’s selection of Feiyan as its IoT platform. As part of this collaboration, Foshan Lighting has engaged Quectel Information to build a dedicated IoT private cloud platform. This will enable the company to transform Alibaba Cloud Feiyan Platform’s ecosystem and technological capabilities into a competitive advantage.
Market data shows that between 2018 and 2024, the smart lighting and electrical industry has maintained a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeding 20%, reaching a market size in the hundreds of billions. Today’s partnership marks just the beginning. Looking ahead, Alibaba Cloud IoT and Foshan Lighting will explore broader cooperation in domestic and international markets, as well as across online and offline sales channels. Together, they aim to expand the smart lighting and electrical industry, shaping the future of smart lighting innovation.
Amid the wave of IoT smart device upgrades, Foshan Lighting has been actively exploring its own smart transformation. However, the company faced two key challenges in selecting a technology platform: On one hand, while IoT technology is mature, as a traditional enterprise, the costs of in-house R&D and system development are extremely high. On the other hand, leveraging an existing smart device platform would require sharing its brand, devices, and users with the platform provider, posing operational risks.
By partnering with Alibaba Cloud, Foshan Lighting has developed its own platform based on the technical foundation of Alibaba Cloud’s Living IoT Platform, striking a balance between technological advancement and independent growth. According to Alibaba Cloud, after four months of joint development, Foshan Lighting successfully built its proprietary IoT platform using Alibaba Cloud’s Living IoT Platform. This platform supports multiple connectivity options, including WiFi and mesh networking, and is designed to serve global markets. In its first year of operation, it is expected to connect over 2 million smart devices.
Alibaba Cloud’s Living IoT Platform is a large-scale cloud platform capable of connecting billions of devices. It integrates essential smart home technologies and helps traditional manufacturers and brands in lighting, electrical, home appliances, and home improvement rapidly upgrade their IoT capabilities. Currently, the platform supports over 500 partner brands and 119 device categories.
Chen Mingbo, Head of Alibaba Cloud’s Living IoT Platform, stated that the platform enables traditional enterprises to efficiently integrate smart devices into the IoT ecosystem. Additionally, it allows businesses to build their own complete IoT systems on top of the platform. The platform not only supports IoT needs within China but also has robust international capabilities. With data centers deployed in Virginia, Frankfurt, and Singapore, along with global acceleration nodes, it ensures seamless IoT device connectivity worldwide.
Zhu Yiguang, R&D Director at Foshan Lighting, shared that the company began exploring smart solutions in 2015, experimenting with both self-built IoT systems and existing IoT platforms. Through these experiences, Foshan Lighting gained a clear understanding of the pros and cons of each approach: Developing an in-house platform may seem straightforward, but achieving large-scale, secure, and stable device operations presents immense technical challenges. Meanwhile, joining an established IoT platform offers easy integration but shifts key brand and customer touchpoints to the platform provider, leading to long-term disadvantages.
Alibaba Cloud’s Living IoT Platform combines the best of both approaches, allowing Foshan Lighting to maintain control over its business and customer resources while leveraging a mature IoT technology system to quickly establish its own platform. Zhu expressed confidence that this collaboration will create a globally influential ecosystem centered on smart lighting, integrating intelligent products, applications, and services.
A new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is in full swing. Smart cars have become a new trend in the global automotive industry. In September of this year, at the International Motor Show Germany, one of the world’s top auto shows and Europe’s largest auto show, the latest million-pixel HALO screen developed and produced by Liaowang and the latest Avatr 12 sports car model with Avatr’s brand feature HALO welcome interactive screen jointly appeared, which can realize a series of signal interactions such as brand promotion, pedestrian courtesy, and warning prompts, and confidently show the charm of “Made in China” and China’s high-end intelligent automobiles to the world.
Such an intelligent car light that can think and understand social interaction is precisely the innovative product of the R&D of Nanning Liaowang Automotive Lamp Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Foshan Lighting. In recent years, Foshan Lighting has increased its layout in the new energy vehicle lighting market, attracting widespread attention from the industry and capital markets, and has become a vivid interpretation of Foshan Lighting’s innovation-led high-quality development.
From a small light bulb factory on the banks of the Fen River, Foshan Lighting has now become a listed company with a brand value of over 30 billion yuan. As one of the few state-owned holding industry leaders in the country, Foshan Lighting has been deeply involved in the lighting industry for 65 years. In the face of the overall slowdown in demand and overcapacity in the lighting industry, how to win fierce market competition and achieve new growth? Foshan Lighting chose to change lanes and speed up on a new track. The company’s party committee fully played the role of “setting direction, managing the overall situation, and ensuring implementation” in-depth research around optimizing industrial layout, technological innovation, etc., further consolidated the main direction of relying on the real economy and manufacturing industry, and clarified the development ideas of “stabilizing the basic plate and opening up new tracks”.
In accordance with the specific deployment of the Provincial Party Committee’s “1310”, Foshan Lighting adheres to the leadership of party building and focuses on building first-class R&D institutions, introducing first-class talents, and launching first-class products, comprehensively activating innovation power, giving full play to the advantages of Liaowang in technology, production capacity, customer channels, etc., promoting the coordinated development of the vehicle lamp lighting industry chain, supply chain, and innovation chain, accelerating the transformation of vehicle lighting electronic business to the middle and high end and the expansion of the new energy market, and realizing the transformation from light source to vehicle lamp luminaire assembly matching. In the first half of this year, the revenue of the vehicle lamp business reached 720 million yuan, accounting for 25.34% of Foshan Lighting’s total revenue, becoming the third largest pillar business after general lighting products and LED packaging and component products.
Talent is the first resource. Foshan Lighting has been building a talent highland with perseverance, and has introduced more than 650 talents in different professional and technical fields including electronics, structure, optics, ID, software and hardware, and project development in recent years, including 10 doctors and 22 masters, providing talent support for the company’s development. Last year, it invested 267 million yuan in R&D, carried out 51 high-tech R&D projects and 12 key core technology research, flexibly introduced 11 external teams, solved problems in radar sensing technology, industrial design and development, intelligent module, etc., established six core technology libraries of light, heat, machine, electricity, linkage, and industrial design, participated in the compilation of 22 international, national, industry, and group standards, obtained 335 authorized patents, and was rated as a “national intellectual property demonstration enterprise”.
As the main force of Foshan Lighting’s vehicle lighting business, how Liaowang Automotive Lamp Co., Ltd. introduces and cultivates more high-precision and cutting-edge talents, and better supports the innovative and leapfrog development of the vehicle lighting business? Foshan Lighting has given an answer with extraordinary means and efforts. More than 50 high-end R&D technical talents have been introduced in the vehicle lighting sector, including industry-leading R&D talents and their teams. A vehicle lighting research institute has been established in Shanghai to carry out vehicle lighting technology innovation research, radiating and driving the talent cultivation of the three major research centers in Foshan, Nanning, and Liuzhou. At the same time, relying on Foshan Lighting’s Guangdong Provincial Doctoral Workstation, Postdoctoral Research Workstation Branch, and other platforms, it has continuously cultivated a cross-disciplinary, compound, and innovative young talent team, and through technical marketing, driven projects with R&D, and promoted R&D with projects, providing strong support for seizing the technological commanding heights and continuously carrying out product innovation. As of now, Liaowang has 137 authorized patents, including 7 invention patents, 118 utility model patents, and 12 appearance design patents.
Through the effective transformation of talent cultivation and technological innovation, product iteration has yielded fruitful results. Last month, Liaowang exhibited some forward-looking achievements such as high-end vehicle lamp assemblies at the 18th Automotive Lighting Industry Development Technology Forum and the 9th Shanghai International Automotive Lighting Exhibition, known as the “technical wind vane of the automotive lamp industry,” attracting widespread attention from industry insiders and technical experts.
Adhering to the concept of independent research and development to promote technological iteration, Foshan Lighting is continuously promoting the transformation of vehicle lighting products from small lamps and tail lamps to headlights and upgrading to the middle and high end. The Shanghai Vehicle Lighting Research Institute adheres to the development of core technologies such as innovative lighting, system modules, signal lights, and electronic platforms that lead the market, and has developed vehicle lamp intelligent networked technology that can realize human-machine autonomous interaction of vehicle lamps, integrating radar, vision, infrared and other functions in the car, and evolving traditional vehicle lamps that are only responsible for lighting into intelligent driving neural systems with perception and feedback capabilities. LED signal light products have been upgraded from thousands of pieces to tens of thousands of pieces.
At present, some vehicle lamp products of Foshan Lighting have been successfully applied to middle and high-end new energy vehicle models such as AITO, Avatr, and IM Motors. Among them, the front courtesy light that can realize human-machine autonomous interaction of vehicle lights is a global debut. With the whole vehicle driving scene, it can build an exclusive light energy field to meet more personalized expression needs and continuously explore a new blue ocean of vehicle lighting.
Every innovation is the starting point of progress. For sixty-five years, generations of Foshan Lighting people have explored in innovation and tempered in reform, set sail with innovation, and fought in the vast sea of stars. Foshan Lighting said that in the future, it will continue to implement the specific deployment of the Provincial Party Committee’s “1310”, continuously carry out technological innovation and product iteration, and embark on a path of integrated innovation of “lighting +”, accelerating the high-quality development of enterprises.
