Quad-camera phones to push CIS sensors sales to 5bn units in 2020

Led by OPPO, Xiaomi, Huawei, Samsung and Realme, the global shipment of smartphone CMOS image sensors (CIS) is likely to reach 5 billion units this year as quad-camera smartphone designs witness great momentum despite the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report has said.

The pandemic has overall affected the global smartphone industry and the market is expected to be dragged down to the level of shipments in 2014, slightly over 1.3 billion units, representing a nearly 10 per cent (year-on-year) decline in comparison to 2019.

However, as a beneficiary of the continuous improvement in technology and feature sets, the sales volume of CMOS image sensors (CIS) for smartphone applications increased eightfold over the past decade, reaching more than 4.5 billion units in 2019.