China's CMOS Image Sensor Global Share Rises to 21%, Surpassing South Korea to Rank Second
Nashnova编辑部
Chinese CIS suppliers reached 21% global share in 2025, overtaking South Korea for the first time; but Sony alone still commands nearly half the market, and whether Chinese vendors can keep pace with the shift toward 3D integration will determine if this gains holds.
What does "global number two" actually mean?
The global CIS — camera image-sensor chip — market grew 9% year-on-year in 2025, hitting a record $25.3 billion, according to Yole Group data cited by ICviews.
Chinese suppliers' combined share rose to 21%, up two percentage points, overtaking South Korea at 17% and trailing only Japan at 51%.
This means → China has moved from a supporting role to the world's second-largest supplier bloc. But the gap with Japan is still 30 points — Sony alone accounts for roughly half of all global CIS revenue.
Who is gaining and who is losing?
Gaining: OmniVision (豪威科技) posted double-digit growth, led by automotive and security. SmartSens (思特威) expanded across smartphones, security, automotive, and consumer electronics — Yole ranks it among the fastest-growing top-tier CIS suppliers.
Losing: South Korea's share dropped four percentage points in a single year. Samsung remains the world's second-largest CIS vendor, but its revenue was essentially flat — squeezed by Sony at the high end and by Chinese vendors at the mid-to-low end. SK Hynix went further, actively pulling resources back to its core memory business and cutting CIS investment.
In plain terms = Korea is being squeezed from both ends; China is expanding on all fronts.
Where does China's cost advantage come from?
Yole analyst Anas Chalak notes that Chinese suppliers can use both domestic fabs and offshore manufacturing channels, giving them more sourcing flexibility than most competitors.
Close collaboration with local camera-module makers helps cut costs, speed up product qualification, and shorten time-to-market.
This means → China's share gains are not just a price-war story. Supply-chain coordination — a shorter, faster loop from chip to module to device — is the deeper driver.
Beyond smartphones, where is the growth?
Smartphones still dominate, accounting for roughly 63% of CIS revenue in 2025. Sony holds about 57% of the smartphone CIS segment, driven by Apple demand and higher-resolution, larger-format sensors.
But growth is diversifying: automotive, security, drones, robotics, AIoT devices, and smart-home products are collectively broadening the demand base for Chinese CIS vendors.
A concrete signal: Orbbec (奥比中光) and SmartSens signed an expanded partnership at the 2026 World Robot Conference, planning to combine Orbbec's 3D depth-sensing chips with SmartSens CIS products for embodied-AI vision — letting robots "see" their environment for perception, object recognition, and obstacle avoidance.
What is the next competitive frontier?
The industry's competitive focus is shifting from shrinking pixel sizes to 3D integration — stacking sensor, logic, and memory dies together like layers in a sandwich.
Sony's three-layer stacked sensors for iPhone and OPPO represent the current state of the art. The next phase involves bonding CIS dies with logic and memory chips built at 28 nm and 22 nm nodes, boosting power efficiency, readout speed, and on-chip processing.
This means → the future contest is not just about "who takes a sharper photo" but about who can combine sensing, computing, and memory on a single chip. Whether Chinese vendors can keep pace with this architectural leap is the key test of whether their share gains can continue.
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