Status Quo of Optical Lens Industry Chain

Status Quo of Optical Lens Industry Chain

Upstream: Optical raw materials and optical components

Optical raw materials: optical plastic, optical glass

Optical Components: Lenses, Filters

Electronic components: sensors, digital image processing chips

Nippon Electric Glass Co., Ltd., Schott of Germany, Corning of the United States and other companies have become the world’s mainstream optical glass suppliers by virtue of their advanced technology accumulation in the field of optical glass. China started late in the optical glass lens industry, and its technology is relatively backward. Currently, it is still in the stage of producing traditional optical glass. The technical content of the products is low, and there is a certain gap with foreign companies in optical glass and other products.

Optical plastics have high technical barriers to manufacturing processes, and currently this field is mainly monopolized by Japanese manufacturers.

The optical component industry is mainly concentrated in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China, among which Germany and Japan occupy the commanding heights of the optical component industry technology.

According to data, the market size of China’s optical components reached 51.26 billion yuan in 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of 27.1% from 2014 to 2018. The market size is expected to exceed 90 billion yuan in 2023.

 

Midstream

The midstream is optical lens manufacturers and optical lens module assemblers. In terms of value, lenses account for 20.4%-30.2% of the overall industry chain.

At present, the global optical lens manufacturing is concentrated in Germany, Japan, China Taiwan and mainland China, among which China’s optical lens manufacturing is mainly based on low-end products.

The value of the optical lens module segment accounts for between 10.3% and 14.8% of the overall industrial volume.

Due to the relatively small industry barriers and relatively low market concentration in this segment, Chinese optical lens-related companies have benefited significantly in the module segment. China’s Sunny Optoelectronics, Qiu Ti, and OFILM are mainly for domestic downstream mobile phone terminal manufacturers. Among them, Sunny Optoelectronics The manufacturer’s products mainly supply mid-to-high-end mobile phone models at home and abroad.

A-share related companies:

In the field of security monitoring, according to data, in 2018, the shipments of Yuyu Optical (300790) and Sunny Optical security lenses ranked first and second, occupying 38.4% and 16.2% of the market share respectively. However, United Optoelectronics (300691) ranked seventh in the market share of security surveillance cameras.

Mobile phone lens: Sunny Optical, Qiu Titanium Technology.

 

Downstream

Application of Optical Lenses. It mainly covers security monitoring, mobile phone camera camera modules, vehicle camera modules, machine vision systems, etc. The increase in downstream applications will drive the steady development of the industry. In 2018, smartphones, tablets, and feature phones accounted for 74.6%, 8.6%, and 7.4% of the global shipments of optical lenses in various application fields, respectively.

Chinese local manufacturers such as United Optoelectronics and Sunny Optoelectronics continue to break through the monopoly of foreign technology in electronic technologies such as optical zoom, auto focus, and optical image stabilization, and continue to improve their competitive advantages in the international market. Taking Sunny Optical as an example, Sunny Optical has successfully developed a triple camera module with 6x optical zoom function with more than 10 million pixels by virtue of its technological innovation in mobile phone lenses.

In addition, Sunny Optical is also a supplier of high-end mobile phone Huawei and OPPO lenses in China, breaking China’s dependence on foreign lens manufacturers, realizing China’s local autonomy in mobile phone optical lenses, and promoting the progress of China’s optical lens industry.

 

Shortcomings

Optical lens: From the perspective of the global optical lens industry, Germany and Japan have absolute advantages in the production and manufacture of high-end optical lenses.

Optical components: Most of the high-end optical components still rely on imports from European, American and Japanese manufacturers, so there is still a big gap between China’s domestic processing level and international high-end technologies.

China relies heavily on foreign imports in the upstream links of the optical lens industry chain.

During the Sino-US trade war, the US imposed a 10% tariff on 31 categories including mounting lenses for CCTV cameras, prisms for optical use, medical optical instruments, and parts and accessories for compound optical microscopes.

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