Surveillance market and SmartSens

From DigiTimes Asia news: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20220527PD203/sensor-surveillance.html

China security surveillance market boom buoys SmartSens

The expanding security surveillance market in China continues to boost the shipments of CMOS image sensor (CIS) chips from Chinese CIS startup SmartSens Technology, which has entered the supply chains of China's first-tier security camera vendors including Hikvision Digital Technology, Uniview Technologies and Dahua Technology, according to industry sources.

IDC statistics show China's security surveillance market scale reached US$16.2 billion in 2021 and is estimated to grow to US$20.1 billion in 2022, for a CAGR of 13.6% for the period. High-definition security camera lenses have become the tipping point of market growth, fast driving CIS sales in China, the sources said.

Since launching its first CIS chip SC1035 in 2014, SmartSens has quickly built a strong presence in the security surveillance sector. Its CIS shipments topped 100 million in 2017 and grew all the way to 146 million in 2020, registering the highest global market share at 35% in the security CIS sector, according to Frost & Sullivan statistics.

Over the years, SmartSens has been dedicated to developing high-performance CIS chips with higher light sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratios, as well as better low-light performance as the core requirements, while deepening deployments in AI, intelligent perception and machine vision capabilities, the industry sources noted.

In terms of future security-use CIS development, its co-founder and CEO Richard Xu has said that as the surveillance lens application scenarios continue to expand, the features of low light and wide dynamic range (WDR) will be increasingly highlighted for security camera solutions so that they can penetrate higher-end applications.

Since late April this year, SmartSens has kicked off a plan to list its shares on China's Sci-Tech Innovation Board (STAR Market), aiming to raise CNY2.82 billion to finance equipment procurement and system construction for its R&D center as well as the development of car-use CIS products, the sources said.