October 21, 2026
Cree Lighting USA Auction Reveals What Remains Behind
A massive equipment sale exposes the infrastructure left after manufacturing operations departed
Lot 1146 is thirty 50-pound bags of "high performance" ice melt. Lot 195 is a Lighting Sciences 6440T high-speed mirror goniophotometer. Both are listed in the same online auction, and the pairing captures what remains of Cree Lighting USA’s plant in Racine County, Wisconsin.
Integra Asset Solutions, an industrial liquidator based in Illinois, opened online bidding October 18 on 1,747 lots from what its listing calls the complete closure of the 700,000-square-foot facility. Lots begin closing November 3. Public inspection runs November 2 through 4, buyers pay an 18% premium on top of the hammer price, and everything must be out of the building by November 25.
The most valuable lots belong to the engineering lab. Alongside the goniophotometer, the catalog lists a 3-meter Labsphere integrating sphere and several smaller spheres, roughly 60 Xitron power analyzers set up for long-term burn-in testing, about a dozen Thermotron environmental chambers, an EMI test receiver and a Nordson Dage X-ray system. That is the kind of in-house capability that produces photometric files, safety listings and lumen maintenance data.
Lot 128 shows how long that lab took to build. It is an Instrument Systems rig built around the Cree MC-E, an LED package from the years when Cree, Inc. made the chips and the fixtures were the downstream business.
The rest of the catalog describes scale. We count roughly 49 Jungheinrich narrow-aisle reach trucks, about 168 steel daughter carts and more than 300 sections of 14-foot pallet racking. Close to 130 banks of six-door lockers, roughly 770 doors, outnumber the roughly 580 workers furloughed in October 2025.
What Isn’t in the Catalog
The online sale contains no finished luminaires, no LED boards, drivers, housings or optics, and no product-specific molds or extrusion dies. The production equipment points to final assembly: banks of transducerized screwdrivers, robotic optic and silicone cells, leak testers suited to IP-rated outdoor fixtures, and wire crimping presses. That suggests housings and LED engines were bought in.
Some of that absence has an explanation. In September, Phoenix Lighting said it had secured manufacturing equipment, inventory, intellectual property and certifications tied to the former Cree Lighting USA lines, and told us that equipment was relocating to its Milwaukee facility. What remains in Racine looks like what nobody needed to keep building those products, including, apparently, the lab.
Other gaps are harder to read. Integra says lighting components, parts and inventory are available by bulk offer only, outside the online sale. Molds often sit at casting suppliers rather than in the plant. The catalog also skips lots 1338 through 1346 in the test-equipment section, which can mean leased gear returned to a lessor, a private sale or items claimed by another party. Which applies here is not yet clear.
A Seller Without a Name
The listing never identifies the consignor. Asked whether the seller is Beta LED Lighting LLC, Lumen LED Lighting LLC or another party, Integra told us it is not privy to that information and that its agreement obligates it to reference only “Cree Lighting.”
The answer matters to Cree Lighting USA’s unpaid vendors. Beta LED and Lumen LED are two unknown startups that acquired substantially all of the company’s assets in the May Article 9 sale. Mayville Engineering holds a $195,213 judgment, while Vision Plastics and NaturaLED have roughly $649,000 in claims pending in Racine County. The hammer prices will show how much money the sale raises. They will not show who receives it.
What to Watch
Final bids on the goniophotometer, the large sphere and the reach-truck fleet will put a number on what years of lab investment fetch in liquidation. The buyer list will show who wanted it, whether competitors, independent test labs or equipment dealers.
Ruud Lighting started in Racine in 1982. Over four decades and four owners, the business built the lab now listed lot by lot. The product names live on in Milwaukee under the Phoenix name. The rest of the legacy closes November 3, one lot at a time.
