At present, benefiting from the recovery of traditional markets such as security, the return of the consumer electronics market to the upward channel, and the acceleration of the intelligentization of the automobile market, local CIS companies are ushering in a new wave of CIS development.
According to financial report information, the three CIS manufacturers, Will Semiconductor, GalaxyCore, and SmartSens, have strong performance growth in the first half of the year; SMIC and Huahong Semiconductor have successively stated in their financial reports that "demand for CIS products has increased" and "capacity is in short supply"; CIS chip packaging leader Jingfang Technology has seen rapid growth in production scale since Q4 last year. According to relevant institutions, the global CIS market size is expected to be US$21.4 billion in 2024, and is expected to be close to US$30 billion in 2029.
According to data from research firm TechInsights, the global smartphone image sensor market size will grow slightly in 2023, with total revenue exceeding US$14 billion. Among them,Sony Semiconductor will become the biggest winner in the global smartphone CIS market in 2023, occupying more than 55% of the market, Samsung will occupy more than 20% of the market, and OmniVision will rank third with a share of about 7%.
Although Sony is still the undisputed leader in the CIS field, in this round of CIS recovery, a number of domestic manufacturers are stepping up their market development efforts and gradually becoming "competitive" with Sony and Samsung. There are two main factors:
First, the mobile phone market accelerates the domestic substitution of high-performance CIS.
Previously, high-performance CIS was mainly supplied by Sony and Samsung, but as domestic manufacturers accelerate their technological upgrades, some mobile phone models such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor, vivo, and Meizu have begun to turn to domestic manufacturers.
Take Xiaomi as an example. Its 14 series main camera CIS abandoned the Sony IMX800 and IMX989 used by Xiaomi 13 and Xiaomi 13 Pro, and instead equipped with "Light and Shadow Hunter 900 (OVX9000)", which is a customized version of OmniVision OV50H.
OV50H is a 50-megapixel CIS released by OmniVision at CES 2023. It is its first sensor with horizontal/vertical (H/V) quad phase detection (QPD) function and is gradually becoming one of the important choices for the main camera of domestic mobile phone manufacturers. According to supply chain news, SmartSens has also become an important supplier of 50-megapixel CIS for my country's smartphone OEMs, and GalaxyCore's 50-megapixel products are also in the shipment stage for brand customers.
Second, the slowdown of Korean manufacturers affects the market pattern.
At the beginning of this year, SK Hynix reorganized its CIS team and shifted its strategic focus from expanding market share to developing high-end products.
In the past, SK Hynix had a small scale in the CIS field, focusing mainly on low-end CIS with a resolution of 20MP or less. It previously provided 13MP CIS for Samsung's foldable phones and provided 50MP sensors for the Galaxy A series last year. However, due to poor unit prices and shipments, SK Hynix has been reducing its CIS production and reducing inventory.
In addition, Samsung, another leading CIS manufacturer, plans to stop using its own GN3 sensor in the Galaxy S25 and S25+ models and prepare to use Sony's CIS solution. Another influencing factor is that as the competition between Samsung and SK Hynix over HBM becomes increasingly fierce, Korean manufacturers are leaning on each other to invest more resources and energy in the key field of HBM.
In this CIS market where Sony is in the front and Chinese manufacturers such as OmniVision and SmartSens are squeezed in the back, Korean manufacturers choose to give up part of the CIS market first, which is obviously a strategic choice based on the industrial layout. And this adjustment gives Chinese manufacturers more market space to conquer the city.
This paper is from Ulink Media, Shenzhen, China, the organizer of IOTE EXPO (IoT Expo in China)
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