Sony's Dominance in Image Sensor Market and Future Trends

TapTechNews June 6th news. Sony's position in the image sensor field is undeniable. Sony's Imaging and Sensing Solutions division has recently released a report detailing Sony's leading position in this field and its view on the future development trend of smartphone camera.

First, let's look at Sony's remarkable achievements in the image sensor market in recent years. Despite the market being full of variables, Sony's market share has been consistently increasing over the past few years. In 2022, Sony's market share in terms of revenue in the image sensor market was 49%, rising to 53% the following year and is expected to reach 58% this year, and is expected to break through 60% by 2025.

At first glance, an increase of 11 percentage points may not seem like a lot, but it should be noted that the global image sensor market was worth more than $23 billion in 2023. In such a huge market, even a 1% increase in share will bring a huge increase in revenue.

Sony's market share growth is partly due to its huge capital expenditure in the image sensor business. Between fiscal 2012-2014, Sony spent approximately 140 billion yen (TapTechNews note: currently about 6.509 billion RMB) to expand the sensor business; in the following three years, this figure increased to 3600 billion yen, and then rose to 5800 billion yen. In the most recent three years, Sony's capital expenditure has been as high as 9300 billion yen. Such a huge investment will be reduced by 30% in the next three years.

Huge capital expenditure is also accompanied by an increase in R&D expenses, from 2500 billion yen in 2012-2014 to 6400 billion yen recently. However, the proportion of R&D expenses to sales has remained at a relatively stable level, about 15%.

Sony's willingness to invest heavily in the image sensor business stems from the growing demand for devices with larger and better sensors (including smartphones). Sony points out that the picture quality of mobile cameras mainly depends on five characteristics closely related to the performance of the image sensor: dynamic range, noise control, read speed, energy efficiency, and resolution.

For still photography, Sony believes that combining a larger-sized image sensor with artificial intelligence can achieve the best performance. However, image processing requires a lot of computing power, which limits its effectiveness in video shooting as video needs to process at least 24 frames per second.

We believe that each characteristic requires further improvement in performance, and there is still much room for technological progress, Sony said. Because it needs to be processed in real-time, the video quality is more directly determined by the characteristics of the image sensor.

Because of this, Sony's report details the benefits of larger image sensors in both still photography and video shooting. The report shows that the image sensor sizes of the main camera and auxiliary cameras (such as ultra-wide angle and telephoto) have been increasing in recent years. What is more notable is that Sony forecasts the market demand of the image sensor by size by 2030 and predicts that by 2030, the average image sensor size of the main camera of smartphones will increase by more than 200% compared to 2019. The increase of the sensor size of the auxiliary cameras will be slightly smaller, but it is still expected to increase by more than 150%.

Huge R&D and manufacturing costs are required to develop and manufacture larger-sized sensors, so it is not surprising that Sony firmly believes that the sensor demand will increase significantly and invests heavily to ensure that it can meet the expected demand.< /p>