Aptina Becomes Independent within a Quarter, Its Sales Dominated by 3MP

Seeking Alpha published Micron quarterly conference call transcript. Not that much was told about image sensors business.

Mark Durcan, COO & President:

...image business migrating more toward the higher-end pixel density and obviously was through May and I think as we move throughout this fall, the second half will probably be dominated by 3 meg. And we were well positioned in that space and currently that business bottomed really a couple of quarters ago and if you notice our results compared to some others, we've continued on a pretty good path of recovering you know where I think we had lost for a couple of other reasons out of the marketplace historically. So that's actually going pretty well. And we know what our targets are for that business and as we've noted before we're exploring with potential partners how we can achieve those targets. And I would just say that we hope to accomplish or I suppose another way of saying it is complete something sometime in this quarter in terms of separation.

Analyst John Lau - Jefferies & Co.:

How much of your image sensor business is 3 megapixel and above?

Ronald C. Foster, CFO:

We just reviewed that data before the call. It's more than 50%.

John Lau:

And to which end markets are you selling handsets versus digital cameras?

Ronald C. Foster

The majority of the revenue's going to handsets. That's correct.

John Lau:

So are you seeing any trend there in digital cameras, your image sensors are replacing CCDs or is that domain pretty much left to CCDs?

Ronald C. Foster:

No, we have selectively won a couple of camera designs away from the CCD makers. That's the 8/9 megapixel area so I certainly would not suggest that today CMOS sensors are taking over CCDs in the DSC space, Digital Still Camera space, but we have I don't know between five and 10 active projects underway in the digital still camera area with our CMOS sensors.