Himax Reports CIS Sales Down, Wafer Optics Sales and Prospects Up

Himax reports its Q3 2012 results. The company CEO Jordan Wu updates on image sensor business status:

"In our CMOS image sensor product line, the delay of Win 8 launch from Q3 to Q4 affected our shipments of 1 mega-pixel sensor during the third quarter. However, we expect such demands to resume starting Q4 thanks to our design-wins with a number of tier-one laptop names. Beyond laptop, we have also won design-wins in smartphone, tablet and surveillance applications from a wide range of customers. We also launched a 5 mega-pixel sensor in the third quarter which targets smartphone market. It will begin some shipment in the fourth quarter.

Our wafer level optics experienced double digit growth during the third quarter. The production of WLO for VGA, or 300,000-pixel, lens in our fab has been made smoothly with high and stable yields. With that, we are moving up the scale to start sampling our WLO with HD, or 1 mega-pixel, resolution, which we believe has a good potential of taking up a meaningful amount of the front camera market for smartphone. We expect our HD WLO to start mass production in early next year."