Motley Fool on Micron

Motley Fool published an investment opinion on Micron, covering image sensor business, among other things. Micron's advances in this area are truly amazing:
"Micron expects the worldwide CMOS sensor market to grow from 540 million units in 2005 to 1.7 billion in 2010, for about 25% annual growth.

So far, Micron's sales of CMOS sensors have grown much faster than 25% annually. In 2003, sales amounted to just $16 million, but by 2005 they had grown to $303 million. Strong growth is continuing this year and totaled more than $313 million (12% of Micron's overall sales) in just the first two quarters of fiscal 2006. In a very short time, Micron has scooted out in front of Omnivision Technologies (Nasdaq: OVTI) and owns the industry-leading market share. Furthermore, the gross margins were more than 43% for the image sensor business -- much higher than the 15.6% gross margin for the combined DRAM and specialty memory segment.

As you might suspect, the strong growth in CMOS sensors hasn't gone unnoticed, and many competitors are pursuing their own chunk of the market. While Omnivision and Micron together control about 60% of the market, the remaining 40% is split among companies such as Toshiba, MagnaChip, Sony (NYSE: SNE), ST Micro, and Avago. While I don't expect that the competition will go away, Micron will most likely remain a significant player in the market for CMOS sensors."