Yole CCM Industry Report

Yole Developpement publishes a report "Status of the Camera Module Industry 2019 – Focus on Wafer Level Optics." Few quotes:

"The camera module industry has reached a new stage in its development. With $27.1B of global revenues generated in 2018, Yole Développement expects it to maintain a 9.1% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for the next 5 years. This industry, which covers image sensors, lenses, voice coil motors, illuminators and camera assemblies, will therefore reach $45.7B by 2024. The overall growth is a combination of mega trends. The main upward driver is the increasing number of cameras in products such as smartphones and cars. 3D sensing cameras are part of this trend, invading mobile devices, computing and automotive industries. If the nature of camera module making is unchanged with 3D sensing, illuminator submodules create a new market area. This brings new technologies, such as wafer level optics (WLO), along with it. The market for devices involved in illumination for 3D sensing accounted for $720M in 2018 and will expand ninefold within five years, reaching $6.1B by 2024. This is helping compensate for the shipment volume slowdown in smartphones, computers, tablet and digital cameras. While the complexity and cost of each individual camera is still increasing on average, reaching $5.5 per unit, we are now seeing more diversity. In recent years the distribution of resolution, optical format and camera type was only heading towards uniformly high specifications. But in 2018 the smartphone market has evolved quite dramatically. In an attempt to work around the increasing cost of imaging, mid-range phones have been implementing 2-5Mp formats that were previously fading away.

This new equilibrium between volume, cost and specification is lowering Yole Développement’s forecast with respect to the previous 2017 report, but overall the direction of the industry remains highly attractive."