Unfortunately, OmniVision ended up losing market share to tough competitors such as Micron Technology.
OmniVision this afternoon posted better-than-expected results for its fiscal second quarter ended October.
What all this means is that OmniVision no longer has a technology advantage or a cost advantage.
OmniVision said it was disappointed in its second quarter results, which followed an unexpected cutback in customer orders.
And the ever-improving camera looks to be an OmniVision Technologies ( OVTI) product.
OmniVision Technologies Inc. ( OVTI) designs, develops and markets semiconductor image-sensor devices.
FORBES: OmniVision Calls Popular Ahead of Earnings; How You Can Join the Trend
OmniVision ended up missing the move to 1.3 megapixel cameras for mobile phones--and most of those wins went to Micron.
And MediaTek has started bundling in with its products, imaging sensors from a company called PixArt, to the detriment of OmniVision.
On top of that, Micron was able to sell it at lower cost because, unlike OmniVision, it had its own manufacturing facilities.
Micron had developed the same kind of design image sensors that OmniVision was selling, and the product was higher quality than OmniVision's.
As a result, OmniVision has not been able to recapture lost ground.
But even here, where OmniVision is an established player, it has not come back with a really competitive camera sensor for this market.
Unfortunately, OmniVision ended up losing market share to tough competitors such as Micron Technology (nyse: MU - news - people ).
However, OmniVision did surprise investors in February when it announced a 5.17 megapixel auto-focus camera module for mobile handsets based around the OV5623 CameraChip sensor.
OmniVision Technologies (OVTI) reported fiscal second quarter earnings late yesterday, with an outlook that may suggest smartphone makers are ordering fewer parts from the company.
As the successor to OmniVision's very popular OV5640, the new OV5645 has retained only a MIPI port, eliminating both the bandwidth-limited DVP interface and the costly embedded JPEG compressor.
But the Christmas quarter warnings from Omnivision and Triquint were the biggest shocks to investors, who had assumed that the Apple deals of these component vendors would guarantee strong quarters.
Shares of optical sensor company OmniVision Technologies are trading sharply lower Monday morning after the company reduced its revenue outlook for its fiscal second quarter ended October 31.
The fund holdings of Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Omnivision Technologies and Micron Technology account for almost 21% of the fund and should perform well as the demand for the iPhone grows.
After the close of trading tonight, OmniVision will step into the earnings limelight, and investors will find out just how well the company held up during the most recent quarter.
FORBES: OmniVision Calls Popular Ahead of Earnings; How You Can Join the Trend
The bleak outlook makes shares of OmniVision particularly unattractive.
OmniVision remains heavily dependent on China for its business.
On March 1, OmniVision reported disappointing third quarter earnings.
On its post-earnings conference call, OmniVision said the weaker gross margin in the April quarter reflects the impact of a decrease in sales of previously written down inventory and an increase in inventory valuation allowances.
FORBES: OmniVision Shares Crushed After Fiscal Q4 Earnings Report
Also putting pressure on the company's stock was a report on the website Digitimes, which covers the computer and related industries, that Hewlett-Packard had chosen Micron Technology over Omnivision to supply image sensors for its cameras.
Back in 2005, OmniVision, which designs image sensors--silicon semiconductors that turn photons into electrons so that they can be processed, stored or displayed--made about 75% of revenues from selling its camera chips to developers of mobile phones.
OmniVision shares are trading sharply lower this morning after FBR Capital analyst Craig Berger asserted in a research note that the chip company could be at risk of losing its status as the dominant provider of image sensors for the Apple iPhone.
应用推荐