offers exciting insights into the stranglehold Sony has on the image sensor industry and how the company views the smartphone market moving forward.
While an 11 percentage point jump may not sound like much at first, the global image sensor market was valued at over $23 billion in 2023. Any increase in relative share of a market that valuable, even one that was just a single percentage point, has massive implications for total revenue. Understandably, these capital investments have come with increased research and development expenses, ranging from 250 billion yen in 2012-14 up to about 640 billion yen . However, R&D expenses as a ratio to sales have been pretty steady, hovering around 15% annually.
With still photography, Sony believes in combining larger image sensors and AI to extract the best possible performance. However, image processing is computationally demanding, which limits its efficacy for video, which has at least 24 image frames each second.