The back of 2023 is fading away, the optical camera industry is starting a new journey again, and the market size is sprinting to tens of billions in 2024.

 

 

 

The past few years have been quite torturous for optical players. Although the car track continued to increment, but far from being difficult to resist the downturn of the main cell phone battlefield downgraded rules and regulations, until the first half of last year's most freezing point.

 

 

 

The biggest memory point about the cell phone market in 2023 is nothing more than the Huawei mate 60 series in September to rewarm the industry chain. Chaodian Think Tank believes that the deeper reason is that the consumer economy is warming up, terminal manufacturers generally complete the work of de-inventorying, and a new round of industry cycle arrives.

 

 

 

After the lenses, modules, CMOS chips, filters and other structural components have made market price adjustments one after another, the development of the camera industry in 2024 will be multi-faceted, in addition to the full penetration of cell phones, automotive, security, XR and machine vision and other segments, the technological end of the open and shut battle will be upgraded again.

 

 

 

01 glass-plastic hybrid lens rise

 

Cell phone space by the CMOS chip, anti-shake motor and other structural components extrusion, while the injection molding technology is difficult to quickly breakthrough, multi-P plastic lens performance enhancement will be limited.

 

 

 

 

Compared with plastic lenses, glass-plastic hybrid lenses have larger aperture, high resolution, low thickness, low temperature drift and other advantages. According to the tide of electricity think tank understanding, after these years of precipitation and accumulation, glass-plastic hybrid has gradually towards maturity, in 2024 can be used as a powerful supplement to the mainstream lens product line.

 

 

 

02 Periscope Technology Returns

 

The biggest highlight of iPhone 15 is the first flagship model equipped with a periscope lens, coupled with Huawei's Mate 60 also adopts a periscope lens design, the heat and prospects of this technology is fully optimistic.

 

 

 

 

According to the ChaoDian Think Tank, Huawei, OPPO, Xiaomi, Vivo and other cell phone manufacturers have launched smartphones equipped with periscope lenses three or four years ago. In the field of periscope and telephoto lenses, the Android camp belongs to the "far ahead".

 

 

 

In 2024, the smartphone image technology competition is even more intense, and the Android system is very likely to fully follow the periscope lens.

 

 

 

03 blood battle 50 megapixels

 

From the supply chain's stocking situation, the 50MP camera is still the most stable and reliable configuration for the main/rear camera of cell phones in 2024. Whether it is the self-research algorithm system of brand manufacturers or the hardware polishing of optical camera manufacturers, 50 megapixel is the most competitive battlefield.

 

 

 

 

From the development trend point of view, whether it is gaming games, female users and other segments of the market, or run the amount of thousands of yuan "bucket machine", 50 megapixel main camera is prevalent, millet, OPPO, vivo, etc. have 5P/6P high-end flagship image decentralization.

 

 

 

04 Japan and South Korea manufacturers were blocked

 

Ge-tech micro in the realization of its single-chip 32-megapixel products in mass production, late last year and re-launched a single-chip 50-megapixel CMOS.

 

 

 

Including Howell, Stowe, which means that high-end cell phone CMOS has been fully equipped with domestic supply capacity, but also in the delivery, service and cost is more competitive. 2023 has been rumored, Sony, Samsung will greatly reduce the cooperation with China's Android resources.

 

 

 

VCM motor supply, in the blue electronics, new thinking and other manufacturers in the high-end market has also been stabilized, can be completely head-on confrontation with Japan and South Korea, the rise of domestic substitution trend.

 

 

 

05 variable aperture

 

In the history of cell phones, Nokia launched the N86 in 2009 for the first time the introduction of variable aperture design products, providing F2.4, F3.2, F4.8 three automatically adjustable aperture. For ordinary consumers, variable aperture has always been a plus when shopping, not a must.

 

 

 

 

In the last one or two years after the CMOS came to one inch, the practical application value of variable aperture on cell phones has changed again. With the escalation of the battle for intelligent images, professional variable aperture technology will be rapidly decentralized, will usher in a major breakthrough in 2024, and may even become a flagship product standard.

 

 

 

06Concentration of order resources

 

As the upstream optical manufacturers have slowed down in controlling the scale and investment cycle, resulting in a decline in the total supply, the terminal brand in 2023 on the cell phone camera device procurement bidding price to make continuous adjustments.

 

 

 

In the new round of market game, the head manufacturers will launch a more powerful stranglehold by virtue of supply scale cost and automated production advantages.

 

 

 

Chaodian Intelligence has learned that the play in 2024 has changed, and the big manufacturers will generally be responsible for their own production of high-end as well as customer-specific products, and will transfer orders with lower specification requirements to third parties.

 

 

 

07 In-vehicle product price downward

 

Intelligent driving as the driving force, in recent years the car camera as the most mainstream vision system incremental fast, but on the other hand the product unit price downward speed is not slow.

 

 

 

 

 

Exactly the reason, one is the car enterprises in the "burning money" has become more rational, the terminal in the volume greatly strengthened the cost control of the supply chain; Secondly, more suppliers have passed the threshold of the car regulations, anxious to squeeze into the downstream purchasing pool of resources with the price war.

 

 

 

Price reduction wave will become more obvious in 2024, the car camera blue ocean is gradually discolored into a red ocean.

 

 

 

08 High-end 5M/8M accelerate on board

 

The new car-making forces such as Azure Xiaoli, Extreme Krypton, Ne Zha and so on have long been the first to carry 8 megapixel ADAS cameras, but the real formation of high-end scale effect is still marked by BYD and Tesla, the two leading car companies carrying more than 5 megapixel cameras one after another. In addition, the surround view camera will advance from 1M to 3M and become mainstream.

 

 

 

 

 

The automatic driving stage is now gradually evolving from L2 to L5, and the high-level intelligent driving program is gradually becoming the basic configuration for manufacturers to develop new products. The automotive industry predicts that 2025 is a big reshuffle node, so this year, some of the terminal brands of high-end intelligent driving program in the support of the big computing power, may be more crazy and radical.

 

 

 

09 security industry demand rebound

 

Due to the completion of the national smart city and related hardware phases of construction in previous years, the security industry was once regarded as the camera application has touched the "ceiling" of the industry, but in the "AI + 5G" intelligent upgrading, coupled with the growth of demand for family-level, security Camera market has bottomed out and is rapidly rebounding.

 

 

 

 

 

China is the world's largest security camera demand market, is expected to increase to 800 million by 2025. It is worth noting that security camera products are becoming more demanding, requiring performance characteristics such as high temperature resistance, high definition, long-distance monitoring, low-light performance and reliability.

 

 

 

10 machine vision / XR starting volume

 

Cell phones, automotive, security is currently the three main battlegrounds of the camera, but other segments also have a broader growth prospects, including machine vision and XR is the most optimistic.

 

 

 

 

 

The demand for machine cameras should not be ignored, compared to civilian products with high image stability, high transmission capacity and high anti-interference ability.

 

 

 

The sales of Apple's first headset in 2024 can be seen as a barometer of the XR camera market. According to industry organizations, it is expected that a single consumer-grade XR headset device will be equipped with at least six different cameras in the future, and the related camera shipments will grow at a CAGR of 41%, and in 2026 will exceed 200 million.