In May 2017 we brought the solar range to Thailand LED Expo, meeting contractors, distributors and government buyers from Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar and Indonesia. In 2025 we returned to Bangkok for the ASEAN Light + Design Expo. The products had changed. The buyers had changed more.
2017: The Basics
The questions then were foundational: will it survive heavy rain, how long does the battery last, is installation difficult, what happens in the rainy season. Buyers were testing whether solar could replace grid lighting at all, and many had already been burned by low-cost imports that failed within months.
Our answers were about sealing, battery capacity and bracket design. The conversation was technical but defensive: prove it works.
2025: The Specifics
By 2025 the same region was asking different questions. How does the lamp perform across several consecutive low-sun days? Can the output be tuned for evening traffic peaks? Is the bracket corrosion-proof near the coast? Can an existing installation be retrofitted instead of replaced?
The shift is from “does solar work” to “which solar works for this road, this budget and this maintenance team”. That is a more demanding buyer, and a better market.
| Year | Typical question | What it implies |
|---|
| 2017 | Does it survive the rain? | Category credibility |
| 2020 | How many grey days can it cover? | Autonomy sizing |
| 2025 | Can we retrofit our existing poles? | Lifecycle cost |
What Drove the Change
Three forces. First, municipal budgets tightened, so buyers had to maintain what they already owned. Second, the first generation of solar installations reached battery-replacement age, exposing which products were serviceable. Third, distributors began competing on uptime rather than price, because their customers started complaining about dark poles.
The Retrofit Conversation
By 2025, a large share of booth conversations were about existing installations. Buyers had poles in the ground and lamps that still worked, but batteries were reaching end of life. Replacing the entire fixture wastes the housing and bracket; swapping a battery and LED module on a semi-split body keeps the structure and cuts the cost per repaired pole.
That shift changes what a supplier must offer: documented module compatibility, a spare-parts price list and a retrofit drawing. It also changes the sales cycle, because the decision maker is a maintenance manager rather than a project buyer.
What Still Trips Up Projects
- Sizing on average sunshine instead of the monsoon week.
- Ignoring bracket corrosion in coastal towns.
- Buying fixtures that cannot be repaired at module level.
- Skipping a pilot section before a full rollout.
Southeast Asia is no longer an early-adopter market. It is a maintenance market, and it rewards suppliers who can document runtime, supply spare parts and support a retrofit.
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