Sunday, October 15, 2017

Yole Image Sensors M&A Review

IMVE publishes article "Keeping Up With Consolidation" by Pierre Cambou, Yole Developpement image sensor analyst. There is a nice chart showing the large historical mergers and acquisitions:


"For the source of future M&A, one should rather look toward the decent number of machine vision sensor technology start-ups, companies like Softkinetic, which was purchased by Sony in 2015, and Mesa, which was acquired by Ams, in 2014. There are a certain number of interesting start-ups right now, such as PMD, Chronocam, Fastree3D, SensL, Sionyx, and Invisage. Beyond the start-ups, and from a global perspective, there is little room for a greater number of deals at sensor level, because almost all players have recently been subject to M&A."

6 comments:

  1. Missed at least one key transaction. Back in the 2010 timeframe.

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  2. I am guessing that your genealogy chart should have been credited.

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    1. To me it looks like an independent work. For example, Atmel is shown to be Thomson spin-off, not in my genealogy. Also, a number of M&A deals are not shown, Omnivision and Superpix relationship, for instance.

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    2. OK. I think yours is the more accurate one relative to your comments above. There are also other errors in the Yole chart. It is a shame that Yole cannot get this right. Makes me wonder about the rest of their reports' data.

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  3. Hi Vladimir, the only spin off on the chart may be Aptina from Micron, the rest is mainly acquisitions. Atmel did purchase the Thomson CCD/CMOS unit https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1189398. This graph explaining the acceleration of recent M&As was not intended to be super exhaustive (only one page). I probably missed a few things like Avago, but I believe the point I wanted to make with this chart is accurate. For sure I noticed your own effort that I think has more ambitious goals, as it is more related to technology/team genealogy and country of origin. I think personaly that those genealogies are missing one thing, the link with todays superpowers in CIS like Sony and Samsung. Now maybe Eric wants to give it a try? Pierre Cambou / Yole Développement

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    1. Sure, Pierre, I understand the limitations of the one page. You managed to fit a lot of info there. I agree that Sony and, to a lesser extent, Samsung became too dominating on the mainstream market. Together with problems, this creates a lot of opportunities too, such as stacked sensor with Sony pixel layer on top of other company's logic die. It will be interesting to see how the market develops...

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