Sony Corporation Global Headquarters

-- What was the reaction to the latest investment?


Our back-illuminated CMOS image sensor has been especially well received, and the large number of customers considering use of this image sensor in their products has rendered us unable to keep up with demand and inconveniencing our customers. However, our vigorous efforts to solve this problem through investment seem to have met with approval.
We are currently working hard to quickly raise production capacity and close the gap between supply and demand and hope our customers will bear with us in the meantime.


-- Current investment is expected to double your production capacity. Does this mean that we consider ourselves at the top of the CMOS sensor industry?


Sony was already a leading supplier of CCD image sensors and by 2009 our share of CMOS image sensor sales became the largest worldwide. This recent investment effort has now provided us with a huge production capacity and sales volume.
Our market share in terms of quantity may seem small. But look at it this way; a confectioner's sells cake usually sliced into eight pieces. You can think of a single slice of that cake as one piece, or the whole cake before it is cut up into slices as one piece. The volume may be the same, but in terms of quantity they differ widely. Sony manufactures sensors with a large amount of pixels - the whole cakes in our example - so even if our quantities are low, our work accounts for the largest share of wafers and sales throughout the world.

-- Like in the digital still camera market, the demand for CMOS image sensors seems to be expanding also in the smartphone market.


The vast number of smartphones has turned picture viewing into a new and rapidly spreading fad. More and more digital still camera like functions are being integrated into smartphones and there is an increasing demand for higher quality image sensors with a higher pixel counts. The drastic changes in the business environment are expected to further spur demand for our CMOS image sensors.