Thanks to smartphones, digital cameras have long become ubiquitous, and few people think about the quantities of the components used in them. Meanwhile, Sony President Yoshihiro Yamaguchi recently confirmed in an interview with Nikkei that the company has shipped 20 billion image sensors for digital cameras, including smartphone cameras, during its presence in the market.
Image Source: Sony
Tellingly, Sony managed to pass the halfway point of this path by May 2019, and it took a little over five years to double the result. The manufacturer does not believe that the market is showing signs of saturation, and therefore will increase its capacity to produce image sensors. Since a TSMC plant producing chips for Sony has already begun operating in the west of Kyushu Island in Kumamoto Prefecture, the latter is also building a new plant for the production of image sensors here. Sony began its activities in this area back in the eighties of the last century.
However, Samsung Electronics began to threaten the Japanese giant’s position in the smartphone camera components market. At least some sources attribute Apple’s intentions to start equipping iPhones with Samsung image sensors. Rumors indicate that at least the 48-megapixel camera of these smartphones with wide-angle optics will be supplied by Samsung. Until now, Sony has been the main supplier of image sensors for Apple smartphones.
In the second quarter of the current fiscal year, which began in April, Sony saw image sensor revenue rise 32% to $3.4 billion, although overall company revenue increased just 3% to $19.44 billion. The division’s operating profit rose nearly twice to $589 million.