Faros has been supplying horticultural LED solutions to Russia and the CIS countries for more than two years now. Part of the Technika company in Ulyanovsk, Faros employs 260 people and produces 70,000-100,000 items a month, with a focus on LED light fixtures. Igor Malygin, 'Agrophotonika' department director at Faros, tells us more about their lighting solutions.
With two years of experience under their belts, Faros now produces two generations of greenhouse fixtures, and they're in the process of creating luminaries for vertical systems.
Yuri Dorozhkin & Igor Malygin at the GreenTech in 2018
Light recipes
At Faros, they don't just produce lamps, they also provide clients with light recipes. "We do not invent anything, but we take already existing solutions for the main commercial greenhouse crops such as tomato, cucumber, rose, and strawberry", Igor says. "These recipes have long been known, we can only refine them taking into account the natural solar insolation in the region, the location of the object and the needs of the cultivated culture (DLI, photo-period and so on)."
Russia as a core market
The horticulture LED market in general is quite competitive, but at Faros they aren't feeling that heat yet: "Our market is Russia and the CIS countries. In this field, we have only one real competitor, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting)", Igor tells us. "We deeply respect our colleagues and are very grateful to this company for the huge contribution to the popularization of LED technology, which they bring daily."
While the company hasn't gone beyond the internal market yet, they have implemented two pilot projects on cucumber and salad in which their system showed 43% savings on electricity consumption in comparison with the PS without loss of yield. "At the moment we are preparing and launching 5 more large and ambitious projects, in which we intend to demonstrate not only the economy of our system, but also an increase in the yield indicator."
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Faros Group
Faros GroupIgor Malygin