Himax Reports CIS Sales Growth

Himax Q1 2014 earnings report updates on its image sensor business: "Our CMOS image sensors delivered a strong sales growth in Q1, up close to 30% sequentially. Our existing 2 and 5 megapixel CMOS image sensors are producing good sales from select international brands and Chinese white-box customers. However, as noted in the last earnings call, the current shipments comprise mainly of older generation products which are of higher costs. The sales of these products, given their rather significant amount by now, is the key reason why our overall corporate gross margin in the second quarter looks to stay flat or even go slightly down. Without it, our overall gross margin for the quarter would have continued to expand. Maintaining sales of such older generation products is necessary while we are going through design-in process with our customers to replace these products with new designs with much improved gross margins. The new generation products are expected to start shipments in the third quarter.

We expect our 8 megapixel sensors to start shipments later this year, which we believe will contribute to significant sales growth and better gross margin in the second half of the year. Additionally, following multi-year design efforts, we now have a competitive CMOS image sensor product line for automotive and surveillance markets, both large, lucrative and fast-growing markets. This is a market segment with a high barrier of entry where special know-how is required. Collectively, we expect the CMOS image sensor business to more than double in 2014."

Himax factsheet says that the company starts to mass produce optics for array cameras in Q2 2014: