TowerJazz Reports CIS Business Growth

SeekingAlpha: TowerJazz Q1 2017 report says that CIS business is one of the main drivers of the company growth:

"With regard to the CIS business units, in the first quarter we continued to grow our business mainly in the industrial sensor and medical X-Ray sensor markets. We saw and continue to see a growth in customers demand. This is in combination of our customer market share growth combined with the growth of the total market.

In the industrial market, we already announced the release of the 2.8 micron state of the art global shutter pixel. This pixel is being used by our lead customers of which each of the announced release of their end family of high resolution global shutter sensors. The technology is available in our RI 110 nanometer Fab in Japan and will become available in Mid Atlantic [ph] as well in 2018.

This allows us to support large format high resolution state of the art global shutter sensors. In parallel we developed a near IR version for this technology mainly to support sensitivity and low light conditions as well as to support the 3D and just direct condition market. The main growth of our global shutter technology is another 8-inch Fab namely RI in Japan and Fab 2 in Israel. However we're now transferring this technology to our Uozu 12-inch 65 nanometer line to support other high volume applications.

We continue to grow our high end photography market share both in still sensors or DSOR and mirror less cameras and in video, namely in the cinematography and broadcasting video segments. The main growth activity in these areas are in our 12-inch line. The automotive market growth is a major focus for CIS business namely in the LiDAR, light based radars that is a key component for the autonomous driving vehicles.

This requires high sensitivity, accurate and low cost LiDAR which requirement can be met with our Avalanche photodiode technology. We expect to see steady growth in the CIS business unit throughout 2017 driven by the industrial, medical security and high end photography market segments or getting more design wins in the automotive and augmented and virtual reality segments, which both segments are contend on our 3D time applied or structure light disk based technology. We believe that these sectors will continue to drive our growth over multiple years."

The Q&A session talks about the foundry business in 3D imaging:

Q: "Related image sensor business, you talked about time light structure, light sensor for 3D sensing, can you just get your sense of when that market starts to take for your and any comments you can make about the breadth of your customer base?"

Russell Ellwanger, CEO: "So we've press released on that in the past. We have several customers that we deal with 3D, with gesture control, the market I think is taking off, it's not the biggest portion of our revenue from CIS, but it is a market that's growing. We have several new customers that are not in volume production at this point, would promise to be extremely powerful growth drivers for our market probably within one to two year time period, but again they're not press released."