Dutch firm Signify, formerly Philips Lighting, has acquired UK smart street lighting company Telensa.

With Telensa, Signify adds narrow-band and Talq-compliant technology to its open and secured systems. This will enable Signify to service a broader group of customers, by making smart city infrastructure affordable to cities using the unlicensed radio space.

Telensa will continue to sell its systems under its own brand name.

The acquisition supports Signify’s priority to grow in professional systems and services. Together, Signify and Telensa will be able to service the many towns and cities around the world that want to reap the benefits of connected lighting in a cost-efficient way, and bring them into a smart city central management system.

“We are very excited to welcome Telensa as part of Signify,” said Harsh Chitale, division leader at Signify. “With its talented team and proven track record, we are adding a well-established technology and competitive offering to fuel the uptake of solutions for smart cities around the world.”

Telensa, headquartered in Cambridge, UK, was founded in 2005 and employs 58 people. The company’s preliminary sales amounted to approximately £11m for the year ending March 2021. To date, Telensa has sold approximately 100 networks connecting over two million light points in more than 400 cities worldwide. Recent projects in the USA, Brazil, Hong Kong, UAE, Australia and New Zealand have shown the global reach of Telensa’s activities.

“Today is a major milestone in Telensa’s evolution,” said Brent Hudson, CEO of Telensa. “Our deep expertise in wireless monitoring and control systems for smart cities is well recognised and we are delighted on behalf of our customers, employees and our suppliers that it has led to the announcement. We very much look forward to embarking on a new journey within Signify and exploring our shared values and vision in the IoT smart city space.”

Recent analysis of the smart street lighting market by Berg Insight listed Telensa as the world’s leading smart city vendor with nearly 2.1 million connected street lights, accounting for 12.8 per cent of the global installed base. Signify was also in the top three along with US-based Sensus.

Major players also include Cimcon Lighting, Dimonoff, Acuity Brands, LED Roadway Lighting, Current and Ubicquia from North America; Lucy Zodion and SSE from the UK; Rongwen Energy Technology Group from China; Revetec from Italy; Schréder from Belgium; Flashnet from Romania; and ST Engineering Telematics Wireless from Israel and Singapore. US-based Itron is big in the networking and CMS segments.

The installed base of smart street lights is approaching 20 million units worldwide, according to Berg. This base amounted to 16.2 million globally at the end of 2020. Growing at a CAGR of 24.8 percent, this will reach 48.8 million by the end of 2025.

Europe leads the adoption of smart street lighting technology and accounted for as much as 35 per cent of the global installed base in 2020. North America continues to lag behind Europe but is growing robustly, accounting for around 24 per cent of global shipment volumes in 2020.

China was at the same time home to more than half of the installed base of smart street lights outside Europe and North America, while the rest of world region excluding China constitutes the fastest growing market.

“The smart street lighting market continued to experience healthy growth throughout 2020 despite the Covid-19 pandemic, though the market might see a slight hiccough in its growth tempo during 2021 following some temporary delays in the issuance of tenders for new projects in the midst of the crisis,” said Levi Ostling, smart cities analyst at Berg Insight.

Growth opportunities are emerging in the market. Procurements for large-scale deployments in the South American market have, for example, in the past two years started to pick up pace while activity is also growing in the potentially huge Indian market.

“We have now also reached the point in time where the first large-scale replacements of early smart street lighting technology installations start to appear,” said Ostling.

In June, Telensa became the first vendor to announce a major replacement project and a growing number of similar projects are expected to follow in early adopter markets such as the UK in the next years.