China Mobile Phone Lens Conquers the World in 20 Years

Not long ago, OFIG, the first mobile phone lens module, launched what is said to be the world's first periscopic continuous zoom lens module with a thickness of only 5.9mm. Xiaomi, on the other hand, showed off its concept product telescopic zoom lens at the developer conference. It is said that the light input alone has increased by 300%.

In the mobile phone press conference, we saw that the mobile camera hardware was also rapidly upgrading, and behind this, there was a rapid rise of Chinese strength.

In this smart phone photo war, we can see many mainland optical enterprises, such as Sunny Optics, Ophiro Optics, Raytheon Technology, Qiuti Technology, etc. Even manufacturers such as Sunny Optics and Ophiro Optics have become one of the top players in their respective fields.

In the Chinese smart phone industry chain, what are the central players in the mobile phone lens industry, and how far are they from the leaders deeply bound to Apple such as Taiwan, China Daliguang? Can the optical industry take the lead in breaking and completing the substitution and promotion of the mainland's industrial chain behind Taiwan's technology industry's annual invention of 20 billion US dollars trade surplus?

Two hardware centers: lens is a big profit and module is a big revenue

When you take a mobile phone apart, in fact, the camera is just a "small box", which is the lens module of the mobile phone.

The reason why it is called a module is that it includes CMOS image sensor (CIS), lens, focusing motor and some circuit components.

Among these parts, the most central parts are CIS and lens, which respectively account for about 50% and 20% of the cost of the whole lens module, while module technology accounts for 20% of the cost.

That is to say, the two key components and module process together account for about 90% of the cost of mobile phone lens.

However, it is quite significant that the revenue volume and profit situation of lenses and modules are just the opposite.

The selling price of lens modules is high, so the main business is lens module manufacturers, such as Ophiro, whose overall revenue volume is large, reaching about 52 billion in 2019. However, due to the low added value of module consumption, the profit is thinner, with a net profit of only 0.9%.

However, manufacturers mainly engaged in consumer lenses, such as Daliguang and Sunny Optics, have a slightly smaller absolute volume of revenue. However, due to the high technical barriers and high product added value of lenses, their net profits will be better. The net profits of Sunny Optics in 2019 will exceed 10.5%.

Because of this, in the mobile phone lens and module market, most players walk on two legs, and the lens and module are planned as a whole. Although they are biased, they will not simply do a certain type of product.

At present, Samsung and Sony control more than 80% of the mobile phone CIS market, and Chinese enterprises such as Howei and Gekewei also share a small part of the market.

In the mobile phone lens and module market, Chinese enterprises, especially mainland enterprises, have a relatively large space to play, and many of them have outstanding performance.

In this category, the hope of completing independent research and development and localization substitution is also the greatest.

Sunny Optics closely follows Taiwan Daliguang, and the technology gap shrinks to 1-2 years

In the two big heads of the mobile phone lens industry: optical lens and lens module, optical lens has relatively high technical barriers and high industry concentration.

The top three players, Daliguang, Sunny Optics and Yujingguang, accounted for nearly 55% of the market share.

Both Daliguang and Yujingguang are Taiwan enterprises, and Daliguang is the leader in the industry, with one accounting for more than 35% of the market. It is also worth noting that Daliguang constantly firmly controls Apple, the central customer, and Yujingguang also has certain shipments.

In terms of cameras, Chinese Mainland enterprises have not been among the central suppliers of Apple.

Apple's request for parts is constantly known for its rigorousness, and its demand for capacity is extremely high. Therefore, entering the supply chain of Apple Center in the field of optical lens should be the next starting point for mainland enterprises.

At present, Sunny Optics once ranked second in the global market share on this track. In 2019, a total of 1.34 billion lenses were shipped. At present, the market share of Sunny Optics in Android camp is close to one third.

Although Sunny Optics has also focused its research and development on medium and high-end products, its average unit price is still about one-third of that of Daliguang at present, but the revenue share of high-end lenses such as 6P and 7P is increasing.

Last year, Shunyu's revenue was 37.9 billion yuan, which was close to two-thirds of that of Daliguang, and its net profit reached 4 billion yuan. Of this, mobile phone lenses accounted for more than 60% of the profits.

The high profit of the lens also stems from its characteristics of high technical barriers. For example, lens design, equipment mold, manufacturing process and other aspects have high technical difficulties.

At present, high-end lenses have been developed from 8P to 9P, that is, there are 8 to 9 lenses in a lens. The more the lens layers, the better the imaging quality will generally be. The optical path generated by light refraction is extremely complex, and how to design the optical path has become a major problem.

Admittedly, just like the semiconductor industry has EDA design software, the optical lens industry also has its own optical path design software, but its workload and difficulty are still huge.

Don't underestimate this small lens. If you add one more lens, the difficulty is to improve the geometric level.

In addition, the more lenses, the higher the request for tolerance, and the higher the request for the precision of equipment mold. At present, domestic enterprises in the equipment side are constantly in a weak position, and most of the top consumer equipment comes from Taiwan, Japan and other places.

And because of its large shipments and deep accumulation in the industrial chain, many equipment manufacturers can even customize their consumer equipment.

At present, resin lenses are widely used in mobile phones due to the limitation of body weight and cost. Taiwan Daliguang is one of the first manufacturers to develop and produce resin lenses, and they have also set up many patent barriers for this purpose.

An expert in the industry informed Zhidong that the most simple and efficient optical path design could be imagined by everyone. However, Daliguang once registered a patent, and other manufacturers could only turn to more complex plans to achieve similar effects and bypass Daliguang's patent.

Finally, in the whole lens consumption process, engineers are actually required to do a lot of manual conditioning work. In this process, highly automated equipment will greatly improve productivity and accuracy, which are the advantages of Taiwan's Daliguang and other enterprises.

Speaking of engineers, in fact, the R&D and production of optical lenses require a large number of professional talents. Such talents should not only understand optics, but also understand fine manufacturing, and also be familiar with the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain.

The relative shortage of talents is also one of the constraints for the mainland to pursue Taiwan's enterprises in optical technology.

In 2013, after buying off Konica Minolta's mobile phone lens consumption base, Shunyu also controlled a large number of key patents, becoming the world's second largest in optical lens patents.

At present, Sunny Optics has completed the mass production of 7P lenses. 8P lenses were once on the road. At present, the mainstream periscope 5x optical zoom lenses are largely made by Sunny.

According to the industrial chain information, they have completed the research and development of 10x optical zoom lens. At present, the technology gap with the leading Daliguang has been reduced to 1-2 years.

The large image lens is also one of the superior projects of Sunny. The 64 megapixel large image lens has been mass produced before Lolo. In terms of the packaging process of lens modules, Sunny has put its main spirit on the high-end modules.

Their MOB/MOC packaging process has been developed to the second generation, which is said to be able to significantly reduce module size and tolerance dimension, while ensuring structural strength and increasing heat dissipation efficiency on this basis.

These features are urgently needed by mobile terminal manufacturers.

Domestic mainstream mobile phone manufacturers, such as Huawei, OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi, are downstream cooperative manufacturers of their lens products. In 2018, Sunny began to gradually take orders for some Samsung mobile phone lenses.

By 2019, Shunyu had become the largest supplier of mobile phone lenses for Samsung in South Korea.