One of the first major product lines to emerge from SGM following its strategic acquisition by Golden Sea in 2025 is the POI range of outdoor luminaires. Developed completely from scratch in a remarkably compressed timeframe of just 12 months, this new family of fixtures represents an impressive milestone in SGM’s architectural lighting evolution. Here, David Morgan takes a closer look at the corporate transition, the technological underpinnings, and the performance characteristics defining SGM’s latest chapter.
Companies, much like people, travel along many different paths throughout their operational lifespans. Some organizations maintain a continuous, family-based ownership structure across multiple generations, preserving a singular corporate culture for decades. Others pass rapidly through a variety of different owners, corporate strategies, and geographic locations as they adapt to shifting market demands and economic landscapes.
SGM firmly falls into the latter category of dynamic transformation. Founded in Pesaro, Italy, back in 1975, the company originally built its early market reputation on a vibrant, colourful catalogue of disco-era lighting products. This foundational portfolio included illuminated dance floor modules, atmospheric smoke machines, and specialized lighting controllers tailored for the nightlife sector. Following a change in Italian ownership in 2009, SGM underwent a comprehensive restructuring in 2012 under the leadership of former Martin Professional founder Peter Johansen. Johansen relocated the company headquarters to Aarhus, Denmark, and officially relaunched it as SGM A/S, decisively shifting its strategic focus toward advanced entertainment and high-performance architectural lighting.
The company’s next major historical turning point arrived in August 2024, when it was acquired by Golden Sea, a prominent Chinese lighting manufacturer. This acquisition neatly coincided with SGM’s 50th corporate anniversary in 2025. Under Golden Sea’s ownership, SGM has successfully maintained its established Aarhus headquarters, its dedicated research and development team, and its distinct Danish operational identity. At the same time, the brand has gained the substantial strategic backing and robust supply chain resources of a much larger global manufacturing group.
Golden Sea commands impressive scale within the global lighting industry, boasting annual group sales in the region of $170 million and employing approximately 1,600 people worldwide. The corporate group also encompasses Ayrton, the renowned entertainment lighting company based in France. Ayrton was acquired by Golden Sea in 2017 when it was still a relatively small operation and has since grown steadily under the parent group’s stewardship.
Today, SGM is guided by a new management team headed by industry veteran Jessie Lilly. Lilly brings extensive sector experience to the role, having previously worked for Martin Professional, as well as Speirs Major Light Architecture and Lumenpulse. Under this renewed leadership, SGM has carefully rationalized both its entertainment and architectural product ranges, actively developing new and revamped luminaires designed to compete strongly in both markets. Willem De Plus serves as the person responsible for architectural product management. The initial stages of all new product development are undertaken directly in Denmark, ensuring the core design philosophy remains anchored in European lighting traditions. Once the overarching design approach is fully resolved and validated, the Golden Sea engineering team takes over production engineering, guiding the products seamlessly from prototype through to full-scale manufacturing and global launch.
The first tangible result of this comprehensive corporate and product revamp is the POI, which stands for Permanent Outdoor Installations, range tailored specifically for the architectural market. Industry observers have noted that developing this extensive and sophisticated family of luminaires completely from scratch in just 12 months is an exceptionally impressive engineering feat. It clearly underscores the immense technical and logistical resources available within the wider Golden Sea group.
The POI range is broadly structured into three core categories: wide wash luminaires, narrow beam luminaires, and linear grazers. All of these fixtures are unified by a common foundational architecture, utilizing the same 45mm diameter colour mixing lenses, multi-chip LED RGBW light engines, and sophisticated driver systems. To achieve this optical consistency, some of the specialized lenses have been meticulously developed in-house by the engineering team, while others utilize trusted, industry-standard components sourced from LEDiL.
The wash light luminaires all share a robust, rectilinear aluminium die-cast construction. The lineup includes five distinct physical sizes, ranging from the compact, square-format 88x88mm model housing a single 15W light engine up to the substantial, rectangular-format 280x470mm flagship incorporating 32 light engines. Furthermore, technical documentation on the company website indicates that two even larger sizes are currently under development. The largest of these upcoming luminaires is slated to be an 850W active-cooling fixture incorporating 36 light engines. Across the existing wash range, available beam angles span from a tight 10° up to a wide 100°, alongside flexible elliptical beam options of 10×60° and 60×10°. Lumen output scales appropriately with power consumption, starting at a modest 421 lumens—measured with all LEDs operating at full power—for the 15W model, and climbing up to an impressive 11,822 lumens for the 250W variant.
In contrast, the narrow beam luminaires are built around a circular profile aluminium die-cast construction. Like their wash counterparts, the narrow beam series spans five physical sizes, beginning with a compact single 15W light engine featuring a 90mm diameter and extending to a high-power 250W size with a 372mm diameter that incorporates 30 distinct light engines. The standard native beam angle for this series is a focused 7.5°. To provide installation flexibility, an external optical film accessory can be applied to modify the standard beam angle up to 80°, while also providing specialized elliptical light distributions of 7.5×40° and 7.5×60° for targeted facade illumination. Lumen output for the beam fixtures ranges from 407 lumens for the 15W entry-level model to 10,192 lumens for the 250W configuration when running all LEDs at full intensity. It is worth noting that the add-on beam-shaping film reduces total light output by approximately 10% to 12%, depending on the specific optical film variant selected.
The linear grazers represent a direct reworking and evolution of the i1 Linear luminaires that were previously reviewed in 2023. These updated linear fixtures now incorporate the exact same 45mm colour mixing lenses and multi-chip light engines found across the wash and beam luminaire types. By comparison, the original legacy versions relied strictly on single-colour light engines paired with non-colour-mixing lenses.
The smallest linear grazer in the new POI lineup operates at 25W, utilizing five light engines housed within an 87x84mm aluminium extrusion finished with die-cast aluminium end caps. The largest current production size runs at 100W, delivering up to 3,630 lumens of output with all LEDs driven at full power, and spans a physical length of 1,220mm. Available beam angles for the grazer series range from 10° up to 60°, complemented by a specialized 10×60° elliptical lens option.
Physical inspection and testing of the sample luminaires provided for evaluation revealed that all units performed exceptionally well. They produced smoothly blended, high-quality colour light output across the entire colour spectrum, despite minor, expected levels of colour separation when viewed at extremely close range. The physical luminaires are notably well-detailed and robustly constructed, instilling confidence in their long-term durability in demanding outdoor environments. Environmental considerations have also clearly informed the mechanical design: up to 60% of the ADC 12 aluminium utilized for the die-cast housings is manufactured from recycled material. Furthermore, SGM has engineered these luminaires to facilitate straightforward dismantling at the end of their operational lifecycle, aligning the product family with modern circular economy principles.
While the Beam and Wash variants within the POI range do not possess a particularly radical or unique visual identity—sharing a restrained design language common to several other high-quality architectural lighting brands on the market—the luminaires successfully set themselves apart through a series of genuinely innovative technical features embedded beneath the exterior shell.
Perhaps the most intriguing and technologically advanced feature is branded as DryTech. This is a patented active dehumidification system designed to proactively eliminate any moisture that manages to find its way inside the luminaire housing. The system relies on an electrolysis-based dehumidifier constructed from a solid-state polymeric ionic membrane positioned between a porous anode and a porous cathode, ensuring the internal optical chamber remains thoroughly dry and free from condensation over years of exposure to harsh weather.
Equally impressive is the factory calibration process applied to every single luminaire. The fixtures utilize a sophisticated internal algorithm designed to produce completely consistent white light points and colour mixes across mixed combinations of fixtures on a project site. When multiple luminaires are commanded to display a specific colour, they automatically match one another as the system dynamically adjusts the internal colour mix without requiring technicians to manually calibrate individual fixture levels on site. While the system natively offers standard 3000K and 4000K white light options derived from the RGBW LED array, SGM’s proprietary control software allows the mixed white colour temperature to be adjusted smoothly across a remarkably wide range from 2000K up to 10,000K using standard DMX control protocols.
Alongside these standout proprietary innovations, the POI range incorporates other advanced technical features that, while increasingly available from select high-end competitors, remain valuable additions to a professional architectural toolkit. These include a dynamic thermal control system designed to protect the internal electronics, as well as a colour boost system that dynamically maximizes light output depending on the precise blend of whites or colours being generated, pushing the fixture right up to its maximum thermal and electrical operational capacities.
The successful development and rollout of the POI range stands as a remarkable technical and organizational achievement for SGM under its new ownership structure. By combining Danish optical and architectural lighting expertise with the vast manufacturing scale of Golden Sea, the company has delivered a competitive, forward-thinking product family. It will be fascinating to follow project results and further developments from SGM in the years ahead.
David Morgan runs David Morgan Associates, a London-based international design consultancy specializing in luminaire design and development, and also serves as the Managing Director of Radiant Architectural Lighting.
