Roland Garros kicks off later this month – without defending champion Carlos Alcaraz, who withdrew due to a wrist injury, throwing the men’s draw wide open. Meanwhile, padel continues its explosive rise across Europe, with over 35 million players worldwide and thousands of new courts being built each year. Whether it’s Grand Slam tennis under the floodlights of Court Philippe-Chatrier or a Tuesday evening padel match at your local club, one thing connects every court: the quality of light above it.

Ask any player what bothers them most during a match. The answer is rarely the surface or the weather – it’s the light. A blinding glare that strikes mid-serve. A drifting shadow that turns tracking the ball into guesswork. Uneven illumination where one end of the court feels like a stage and the other like a basement.

Whether you’re a recreational player or running a facility with courts booked every evening, good lighting isn’t a luxury – it’s the foundation of a playable space. At Lightholm, we’ve spent years engineering lighting that solves exactly these problems, outdoors and indoors alike.

It Starts with Optics

What separates a proper sports luminaire from a cheap floodlight? Optical engineering. A well-designed fixture directs the maximum share of its input power onto the playing surface – not into players’ eyes and not into the windows of neighbouring houses.

More wattage doesn’t automatically mean more useful light. Inexpensive floodlights often lack proper photometric data, which means there’s no way to run a lighting simulation before installation. You only discover what you’ve actually got once the fixtures are up – and by then, it’s an expensive problem to fix.

Every Lightholm luminaire is engineered so that each beam reaches exactly where it needs to go. We offer tailored optical solutions for every project, with datasheets and photometric files available for download on our website, alongside simulation support and technical consultation.

Outdoors: GEO Floodlight

For outdoor courts and fields, our GEO Floodlight system is a modular platform with independently adjustable modules, each ranging from 50 to 450 W, that align precisely to the geometry of the playing surface. Low-angle optics reduce the glare index, improve playability, and keep the night sky dark by minimising stray light. The result: floodlight efficiency of up to 185 lm/W with minimal spill.

The housing is IP66-rated, manufactured from die-cast aluminium, and comes standard with C4 corrosion protection, validated through a 720-hour salt spray test. For particularly demanding environments – coastal areas, industrial zones – C5 and CX coatings are available on request.

Indoors: Steel Sport and Beyond

Inside sports halls, our Steel Sport luminaire is purpose-built for the job: ball-impact tested to DIN 18032-3, rated IK10 for impact resistance, and controllable via DALI 2.0. Lighting levels can be adjusted with the push of a button – full brightness for competition, reduced output for training or recreational play.

Linum and Fornax round out our indoor range, covering arenas, schools, training centres, and multipurpose courts. All are designed for high-ceiling installation, vibration-proof performance, and long operational life under continuous use.

Built to Last

LED module lifespan across our range exceeds 100,000 hours – in Northern European conditions, that translates to roughly 25 years of operation. And reaching end of rated life doesn’t mean the lights go dark; output decreases by only about 10% over that entire period. Real-world proof: luminaires installed by our Swedish partners in 2014 are still running more than a decade later, without a single module replaced.

The real question for any facility owner isn’t the upfront price – it’s total cost of ownership. In Scandinavian public procurement, this is already the deciding factor. The electronics in our GEO luminaires, for instance, can be swapped in seconds without interrupting power, which dramatically reduces maintenance costs over the life of the installation. The cheapest floodlight today often turns out to be the most expensive one five years down the line.

See the Game, Not the Light

As the outdoor season gets into full swing and Roland Garros draws the world’s attention to the clay courts of Paris, millions more players will be stepping onto their own courts – from brand-new padel facilities in Stockholm to municipal tennis clubs across the Nordics. What all of them deserve is lighting they never have to think about.

Because good lighting is like a good referee: you only notice it when it’s bad. Lightholm’s goal is for our luminaires to go unnoticed – so that what you notice is the game.

Meil on hea meel tutvustada Lightholmi keskkonnasõbralikke tänava- ja linnavalgustuslahendusi messil Electricity 2026, kus leiate meid stendilt V14.

1994. aastal asutatud Lightholm on Eesti tööstusvalgustuse tootja, kes pakub vastupidavaid ja suurejõudlusega valgusteid välis- ja ärikasutuseks. Meie tooted on disainitud Rootsis ja toodetud Riias. See võimaldab meil ühendada suure tootmisvõimsuse paindlikkuse, kvaliteedikontrolli ja kohandatud arendusega, mida toetab meie pühendunud teadus- ja arendusmeeskond.

Jätkusuutlikkus on meie jaoks väga oluline. Lightholmi energiatõhusad valgustuslahendused aitavad vähendada valgusreostust ja minimeerida süsiniku jalajälge, samas kui paindlik tootmine tagab kiire tarne ja kohandatud lahendused erinõuetega projektide jaoks.

2025. aastaks on Lightholmi valgustitega valgustatud ligi 48 000 km teid ja 374 000 m² laopinda – tõestatud jõudlus suuremahuliselt, vastutustundlikult ja usaldusväärselt.

Ootame teid messile! Tutvuge meie toodete ja tehniliste andmetega siin. Võtke julgelt ühendust meie Eesti müügijuhi Kristi Truuga aadressil kristi.truu at lightholm.com.

IN ENGLISH

We are delighted to showcase Lightholm’s eco-friendly street and urban lighting solutions at Electricity 2026, where you can find us at Stand V15.

Founded in 1994, Lightholm is a European industrial lighting manufacturer delivering durable, high-performance luminaires for outdoor and commercial use. Our products are designed in Sweden and manufactured in the EU, with in-house, semi-automated production in Riga, Latvia. This allows us to combine high-volume capability with flexibility, quality control, and custom development supported by our dedicated R&D team.

Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do. Our energy-efficient lighting solutions help reduce light pollution and minimise carbon footprint, while our agile manufacturing ensures fast delivery and tailored solutions for niche requirements.

With nearly 48,000 km of roads and 374,000 m² of warehouses illuminated by 2025, Lightholm continues to deliver proven performance at scale—responsibly and reliably.

We look forward to welcoming you at the event.

Take a look at our product portfolio and technical details here. You are welcome to book a meeting with us by contacting our Head of Sales in Estonia, Kristi Truu at kristi.truu at lightholm.com.

European lighting manufacturer Lightholm has received a Designplus Award by Light+Building 2026 in the Sustainability & Future Energy+ category for its GEO Street Light, a modular street lighting system designed to simplify maintenance and extend infrastructure lifespan.

The award was presented during the official ceremony at Light+Building 2026 in Frankfurt.

GEO Street was recognised by the jury for its modular architecture, which allows core electronics to be accessed and replaced without tools via a rear-mounted service panel.

“This recognition reflects the work we have put into rethinking street lighting from the ground up,” said Andris Berkis, Head of R&D at Lightholm. “GEO Street was designed not just to illuminate roads, but to serve cities for decades with a modular architecture that simplifies maintenance and reduces waste.”

Designed for Long-Life Urban Infrastructure

The GEO Street system builds on more than a decade of installations in Nordic environments and is available in M and L configurations suited for urban streets, parks, residential zones, and rural roads.

Its defining feature is a rear-mounted electronics module that can be accessed without tools. Routine servicing or component upgrades affect only 20% of the fixture, leaving the main structure and connections intact. The approach reduces maintenance time, extends operational life, and lowers total cost of ownership.

Each luminaire can also be configured for regional photometric standards, climate conditions, and project requirements. The system supports smart city integration, including traffic monitoring and centralised energy management platforms.

About the Designplus Award

The Designplus Award by Light+Building recognises products that combine design quality, technological innovation, and sustainability. The Sustainability & Future Energy+ category highlights solutions addressing environmental responsibility and future urban infrastructure needs.

About Lightholm

Founded in 2011, Lightholm develops lighting systems for infrastructure and industrial environments, including urban streets, sports facilities, ports, mining operations, and offshore platforms.

The company focuses on engineered lighting solutions combining optical performance, structural durability, and intelligent control systems while meeting strict EU environmental and quality standards.

Media Contact
Annika Ljaš-Eilat
annika@exponential.ee
+372 5559 0044

We are delighted to showcase Lightholm’s eco-friendly street and urban lighting solutions at Light + Building, where you can find us in Hall 4.0, Stand A29.

Founded in 1994, Lightholm is a European industrial lighting manufacturer delivering durable, high-performance luminaires for outdoor and commercial use. Our products are designed in Sweden and manufactured in the EU, with in-house, semi-automated production in Riga, Latvia. This allows us to combine high-volume capability with flexibility, quality control, and custom development supported by our dedicated R&D team.

Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do. Our energy-efficient lighting solutions help reduce light pollution and minimise carbon footprint, while our agile manufacturing ensures fast delivery and tailored solutions for niche requirements.

With nearly 48,000 km of roads and 374,000 m² of warehouses illuminated by 2025, Lightholm continues to deliver proven performance at scale—responsibly and reliably.

We look forward to welcoming you at the show.

Take a look at our product portfolio and technical details here. You are welcome to book a meeting with us by contacting our Head of International Sales, Taavi Salm at taavi.salm at lightholm.com. He will get back to you within 24 hours.

“Here, we are fulfilling God’s will,” says Sven Aabreldaal. And there was light. Quite literally: luminaires are exactly what Aabreldaal’s new brand Lightholm produces — and far more of that light shines abroad than in Estonia. “Too foreign for our own, but our own for foreigners,” Sven remarks.

Pedrobeat AS, the business entity behind the Lightholm brand, has moved from one physical wavelength to another: before light, there was sound. Sven Aabreldaal’s name is likely familiar to the music scene, as the playfully named Pedrobeat has been distributing sound carriers in Estonia since the 1990s — CDs, cassettes, vinyl records, and everything in between.

“Our office is as long as a Moscow train,” Sven jokes after his daughter, company CEO Grethel Aabreldaal, has completed the introductory tour. We really do move in a straight line from one end of the elongated building to the other, like passing through train carriages. In the rear carriage, there are mountains of parallel activity: stacks and boxes of music records.

In the locomotive, however, lies our main interest: along the wall are lighting fixtures that illuminate streets, sports fields, mines, and factories. Sven recalls that the music business was profitable until the 2008 financial crisis — and shortly after, major record labels opened their own offices in Estonia, changing the rules of the game.

“The business disappeared. For me, business means you make a profit and can pay salaries. If you have to take a loan just to pay wages, that’s no longer a business,” Sven states pragmatically.

Entering the World of Light

The turn toward lighting happened in 2013, when Sven’s long-time Latvian partner Andris, who had moved to Sweden, introduced him to a new and energy-efficient field. Sven saw potential: it was green, sustainable, and long-term. “All the right boxes were ticked,” he says.

LED lighting had not yet fully taken hold in Estonia, so it was possible to jump aboard before the train reached full speed. Since then, the company has grown from a lighting reseller into a high-end manufacturer, now exporting 98% of its production.

In August 2019, the company faced a critical crossroads. They had a major Swedish client whose orders were pending, but the factory that was supposed to manufacture the products went bankrupt. The choice was simple: lose the client or start manufacturing themselves. Lightholm chose the latter.

“I think we set some kind of world record in starting a factory. It took us half a year to get production running,” Sven says. “There are processes that simply take time. Our luminaire housings are made of aluminum, and producing the molds alone takes two to three months. After that, adjustments may still be needed. We were lucky to find partners quickly,” he explains.

Today, their 1,200–1,400 m² production facility is located in Latvia, where they also operate a certified laboratory. “That’s an additional income stream. We offer photometric testing for lighting fixtures — measuring their performance in real conditions,” Sven says. While manufacturing takes place in Latvia, product development and management are jointly handled in Estonia, Sweden, and Latvia.

Product Development as Tailoring

Lightholm does not yet aim to compete with mass production. Their competitive advantage lies in small and custom orders. While giants like Philips typically require minimum orders of 5,000 units for specialized solutions, Lightholm is willing to develop and deliver just a few dozen custom luminaires.

Their flagship product is the Geo luminaire, which took four years to develop. It is a technological gem with exceptionally simple maintenance: replacing the lighting module takes less than 10 seconds — without even switching off the electricity.

Grethel suggests that the author try replacing the module. I do. Fingers intact. Success. “See — when you run out of things to write about, your next job is lined up,” the CEO laughs. These very lamps illuminate other countries, where Lightholm has won public tenders through partners. But why not Estonia?

“Making friends with the domestic market has been rocky,” Sven admits. One reason may lie in differences between Estonian and Swedish procurement systems. “The Estonian market is usually built around the lowest price,” Sven explains. Another factor is labor cost. “In Scandinavia, if you put a cheap, low-quality luminaire on a pole, the gentleman who has to maintain it is so expensive that the maintenance alone can cost several times the price of the lamp. In Estonia, it’s the opposite.”

How long will we continue building ourselves into the cheapest possible country, he wonders. “We may find it easier to replace lower-quality luminaires more often — or at least it’s less economically painful,” Grethel adds.

In Scandinavia, they say that if replacing a luminaire module takes more than five minutes, there’s no point in even starting the conversation. As noted, with Lightholm, we’re talking seconds. In Scandinavia, procurement decisions tend to assess the price–quality relationship far more holistically.

“The first street-lighting tender we won there was in 2014,” Sven recalls. “We were definitely not the cheapest bidder. The fixtures we delivered then had a three-year warranty. Last year, I asked our Swedish partner whether they had replaced them with newer models. The answer was no — they’re still working. Today, we offer a warranty of seven-plus years.”

Warranty depends on components. “For example, the lenses are plastic, which in theory could last a hundred years. The LED chips underneath have a rated lifespan of 100,000 hours. In Estonia, streetlights operate about 4,000 hours per year,” Sven explains. A quick calculation suggests those chips could function for 25 years without issue.“And the luminaire doesn’t just stop working — it loses maybe 10% of its quality, which the human eye might not even notice,” Sven adds.

Light, Humans, and Rhythm

Artificial light has undoubtedly disrupted our circadian rhythms, but modern solutions aim to address this more intelligently. While living entirely by nature’s rhythm is no longer possible, there is growing awareness that not all light is the same.

Grethel and Sven explain that street lighting should illuminate life with softness, so that in the evening, a biological being understands it’s time to rest. “But what if that light shines into your bedroom? That’s why street lighting must be directed onto the street — not into apartment windows,” Grethel explains.

In offices and factories, overly pragmatic choices are often made: cheap lights, because light is “just” light. “If you install a yellow light in an office, people yawn more. Install daylight-spectrum lighting, and you’ll spend less money on coffee beans,” Sven says. Cheaper industrial luminaires can also produce an invisible stroboscopic effect that still exhausts people. “Lightholm does not produce strobe,” he adds firmly.

Beyond Scandinavia, Lightholm has entered or established itself in France (having won a railway tender), the Netherlands, Belgium, and Iceland. In cooperation with ABB, they have illuminated sites in Armenia, Dubai, and even Iran, under challenging conditions.

They also manufacture lighting for sports fields, industrial facilities, mines, and livestock farms. “Animal farming has its own nuances,” Sven explains. “Animals do their number one and number two in the same space. That produces ammonia, and ordinary plastic luminaires would degrade quickly in such an environment.”

“Our next target is explosion-proof lighting,” Sven continues. “For example, on oil platforms there are dangerous situations to consider. In a fire, a lamp should melt — not explode into fragments and injure someone.” These niche solutions are precisely what give them a competitive edge.

Home Market and Bureaucratic Obstacles

A painful topic in Estonia is bureaucracy. For years, public tenders required the ENEC+ certificate, which isn’t even demanded in neighbouring Latvia, Finland or Sweden — and would have cost a small company €30,000. “We had ENEC, but the ‘plus’ meant an Estonian company couldn’t participate — while a Latvian one could,” Sven notes.

Even more curious is the requirement that a luminaire must first be registered with the Finnish Road Administration before it can even be considered in Estonia. Fortunately, the world is large — and there is room for new, sustainable technology.

“We were on holiday in Madeira over Christmas, and I literally had tears in my eyes when I saw tunnels without LED lighting. The entire mountain was lit with last-generation technology. And you start wondering: how do you find the person responsible for this?” Sven recalls.

But you were on vacation? “It’s like music,” he laughs. “You go to a pub, a band is playing, and the drummer can’t keep time — you notice immediately. Professional deformity.” “I don’t even need to leave Estonia. Near my home, there’s a schoolyard with 100 lighting poles that aren’t LED, and the state pays huge sums for them. As a taxpayer, I see waste,” Sven says.

The Aabredaal family hints that they already have the capacity to scale production severalfold. Their recent brand renewal — adopting the name Lightholm — reflects a Scandinavian approach. “‘Holm’ means island in Swedish, and I liked the idea of an island of light,” Sven says. Previously, they operated as PBLC – Pedrobeat Lighting Company, but it was time to separate the music and lighting brands.

A Note on the Music Business

Sven’s music business — selling vinyl and CDs — still exists independently. It once seemed that the era of physical media was ending. Then COVID happened.“In February of the first COVID year, our turnover was close to zero. At first, we thought we were done. But then people were locked at home — watching films, reading books, listening to music — and our sales skyrocketed,” Sven recalls.

The main change was that before COVID, CDs were the top seller; post-COVID, vinyl records took first place. “People love the emotion. In Soviet times, not a single crackle was allowed on a fragile record. Today, people crave that crackling sound,” Sven laughs — noting that while the rear carriage remains, Pedrobeat is likely still number one in music distribution in Estonia.

The article was originally published in the leading business outlet Äripäev.

Since 2014, PBLC Nordic has been a trusted leader in innovative industrial lighting solutions. The company has now refreshed its brand and changed its name to Lightholm. Alongside the rebrand, the company is introducing its new innovative streetlight, GEO Streetlight. Lightholm is an Estonian lighting manufacturer producing forward-looking and environmentally friendly solutions – from streets and sports grounds to demanding environments such as ports, mines, and offshore platforms. The products are designed in collaboration between Sweden and Estonia and assembled in Latvia.

The new name, Lightholm, reflects the company’s values and vision for the future. Light – the core of the company’s knowledge and expertise – and Holm – meaning “island” in Swedish – symbolise clarity, focus, and Nordic origin. Lightholm’s mission is to be a trusted provider of high-quality, sustainable lighting solutions, helping customers identify exactly the right option for their needs. The company places great importance on ensuring its products adapt well to the local requirements of each target market.

“Although our company’s roots go back to 1994, the past two years have marked an important turning point. We have established an accredited laboratory, expanded our capabilities to include ATEX, and brought our activities together under the Lightholm name. This new chapter builds on a strong foundation, and I look forward to what lies ahead.” – Sven Aabreldaal, the CEO at Lightholm.

Lightholm’s manufacturing is located in Riga, Latvia, where all production is carried out in-house. The semi-automated production process supports consistent quality and enables efficient high-volume manufacturing. Scalable production capacity allows the company to adjust output according to project and market requirements. A dedicated R&D team develops customized solutions in response to specific technical needs. Manufacturing operations are certified in accordance with ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015, and HACCP standards.

Lightholm’s MOVO streetlights have been installed across various locations in Sweden. That experience inspired the company to develop an even more advanced streetlight – GEO. Street lighting is a vital part of urban energy efficiency and quality of life. GEO’s minimalist and functional Scandinavian design integrates seamlessly into modern cityscapes while delivering reliable and efficient illumination.

One of GEO’s most distinctive features is its electronics panel, positioned at the back of the streetlight, which can be removed without tools. This means 80% of the luminaire remains untouched, and only a small part needs updating. Such an approach significantly extends the product’s lifespan and makes GEO a highly eco-friendly solution. In addition, GEO easily integrates with city infrastructure systems, whether for traffic flow monitoring or energy-saving management.

The brand renewal marks a confident step into Lightholm’s next phase of growth as the company continues to deliver high-quality lighting solutions.