The annual performance forecast of domestic CIS company Steway in 2024 shows that it is expected to achieve operating income of 5.8 billion yuan to 6.1 billion yuan, an increase of 103% to 113%; The net profit attributable to the owner of the parent company is expected to be between 371 million yuan and 417 million yuan, an increase of 2512% to 2830% year-on-year.
On January 26, two days before the Spring Festival, the domestic CIS (CMOS image sensor) company Stiway released the 2024 annual performance forecast, which is expected to achieve operating revenue of 5.8 billion yuan to 6.1 billion yuan in 2024, an increase of 103% to 113%; The net profit attributable to the owner of the parent company is expected to be between 371 million yuan and 417 million yuan, an increase of 2512% to 2830% year-on-year. In the 2024 performance forecast of a number of science and technology board enterprises, Steway is far ahead with a net profit increase of more than 25 times.
Stevie's year-end answer sheet was a surprise. Income growth in 2023 will be a thing of the past. Further ahead, the problem of high inventory caused by sudden cooling in the industry was quickly resolved. The competitiveness of chip companies not only has the ability to follow the trend, but also has the concentration when the market is tight.
At the end of 2024, Steway also announced a data - the single month CIS shipments exceeded 100 million for the first time. It's also a good show of strength. Analyzing the various nodes of the growth of Steway, it can be regarded as a typical, that is, the typical of domestic chip companies challenging international monopoly giants. This paper will comprehensively analyze the development of Steway, in order to explore the pattern of domestic CIS breakdown.
First, timing - time, market and layout
Dr. Xu Chen, chairman of Steway, returned to China to start his own business in 2011.
The biggest news in the CIS circle that year, SONY won the Apple iPhone 4S 8 million pixel main camera order, the reason for winning is very simple - technology lead. Xu Chen, who has worked in international manufacturers such as Micron, is very clear about the business competition situation and underlying logic of CIS.
In the image era of continuous iteration and pursuit of new and excellent technology, CCD technology is rapidly eliminated, and CIS is regarded as a pearl. The explosive growth of the market, so that the first to eat CIS crabs, and smell the fragrance of the fight together, the entire market competition. In the decade leading up to 2011, there were numerous mergers and acquisitions, such as Micron's acquisition of Photobit, National Semiconductor's sale of its image chip division to Kodak, and Cypress's acquisition of SMaL Camera.
Xu Chen stepped on the CIS "Spring and Autumn" period, while sitting on the country to promote scientific and technological innovation and attract overseas high-tech talent high-speed train.
"My dream is to take good pictures with a camera with a chip I designed." This technical master who is very fond of photography, when studying in Tsinghua University, he took the first black and white camera of his life and recorded life everywhere. Also inadvertently, to their own struggle direction, press the shutter.
To be sure, it is not easy to compete with SONY, which is riding high in the smartphone market. Xu Chen's other opportunity, the opportunity to enter the field, is more ingenious. In 2014, Steway successfully entered the field of security applications with its first mass-produced chip product SC1035. It was a benign growth market second only to smartphones at the time. At the same time, the security industry during that period was still in the 300,000-500,000 pixel analog high-definition scale application stage, and Steway's SC1035 became an industry network celebrity as soon as it came out.
As of the first half of 2024, Steway's market share in the security field has exceeded 50%, ranking first in global shipments for several years. Like a single subject excellent student, brush once a year.
In 2019, Stevie caught another opportunity - the core was out of stock. A cause of the global semiconductor industry chain collective thinking of the "out of stock period", car and core, at that moment have formed a tacit understanding, a head into the field of automotive chip research and development. Stevie, who has worn the security CIS crown for many years, also seized this opportunity.
Second, re-layout - extension and innovation
When the core was out of stock, Steway launched the on-board CIS chip and set up the automotive chip department. A year later, in 2020, Steway has shown its muscles in the important domestic automotive electronic technology forum.
"Our AT family of products are tailor-made CMOS image sensors for in-car cameras that address all points of demand in the front and rear segment." The "all points of demand" mentioned by a Steway spokesperson include circumnavigation and front/rear view applications, lane change assistance, parking assistance, lane departure warning, in-cabin monitoring systems (OMS), driver monitoring systems (DMS), infotainment gesture control, and mirror replacement.
There is a black technology in Steway's vehicle gauge product line - LED flicker Suppression technology (LFS) based on QCell™. The official explanation is that the LFS technology can effectively identify LED traffic lights, solve the safety hazards caused by LED flashing at the same time, the use of local multiple exposure to increase the dynamic range, achieve clear and high-quality images without motion trails, increase the applicability of vehicle scenes to further improve driving safety.
Of course, the threshold of the car gauge chip is more than this, because the car on the road is related to life safety, and the chip company must carry out a full range of vehicle gauge level certification from the system, functional safety and reliability. In January 2024, Sterway received the ISO 26262 ASIL B Functional Safety Product certification, and the card is complete. There is also AEC-Q100 reliability certification, IATF 16949 Automotive Quality Management System, ISO 26262 Functional safety process certification and product certification.
In terms of car core, Sterway officially launched its wholly-owned subsidiary brand - Flyingchip in August 2024, along with the FlyingMicro M1 vehicle vision processing chip series, in image processing performance, low power consumption, small package size, functional safety, information security and several core technical levels, a comprehensive effort. Just one parameter here - the M1's on-board high-performance ISP chip has a dynamic range of 144dB.
At the same time, in February 2025, Steway released the 5MP vehicle gauge image sensor, the SC530AT, for clear, accurate and reliable monitoring in Occupant monitoring system (OMS) applications. Quickly opened the New Year's product solution research and development rhythm.
Another big expansion of Stalway is the smartphone. This is a market segment that does not fight once and does not know that CIS has a surging market.
Steway entered the mobile phone market in 2020. In October of that year, Steway launched a full range of Cellphone application image Sensor products -- Cellphone Sensor (CS) Series products, including SC200CS, SC500CS, SC800CS, SC1300CS/SC1301CS and other models. In 2020, a total of 7.08 billion CIS will be produced worldwide, with SONY taking 40% of the revenue market share and Samsung taking another 22% (data from Yole). Steway's mobile phone market layout is to march into the absolute monopoly market. At the same time, for security CIS giants, the smart phone market is an inevitable strategy, and the huge market capacity is almost 9 times that of security.
The mobile phone market pays attention to fast, accurate and ruthless, slow generation, look at its back, slow a year, the back can not look. This has also trained Steway's R & D rhythm of "half a year a small iteration, a year a big upgrade".
It is worth noting that in March 2022, Steway took out the first 50MP flagship mobile phone main camera CIS product SC550XS, which directly killed the high-end mobile phone CIS market. Mok Yaowu, the company's co-founder and CTO, described the chip as a "landmark product" at the time. Specifically, it is a product based on the 22nm HKMG Stack process, with excellent imaging performance based on the SmartClarity 2 imaging technology, as well as the patented SFCPixel and PixGain HDR technology. In addition, 100% full pixel focus can be achieved through AllPix ADAF technology.
In November of that year, Sitway introduced the SC520XS, a 52 million CMOS image sensor with 0.7μm pixel size and an advanced Stacked BSI technology. In 2024, several notable typical products were launched, such as the company's first 50 million pixel 1/1.28 inch image sensor new product - SC580XS, which is an upgrade iteration of SC550XS. 50MP resolution 0.7μm pixel size mobile image sensor SC5000CS, set high dynamic range, ultra-low noise, PDAF phase detection focusing, low power consumption and other advantages. From 2020 to 2024, Steway has 17 CIS chips for the smartphone field.
From the end of 2024 to the beginning of 2025, Steway successively launched new products of 50 million pixel CMOS image sensors for mobile phone applications in the whole process - SC585 and SC555XS. The target is also the flagship model, based on the advanced Stacked BSI process to build, to achieve the design and manufacturing of the full link domestic.
According to official data, the SC555XS has 50MP ultra-high resolution and 1.0μm large pixel size, equipped with Sterway's patented PixGain HDR®, SFCPixel® and AllPix ADAF® technology, supporting 100% full pixel focusing and a variety of HDR modes. With high dynamic range, high sensitivity, low noise, low power consumption and other performance advantages, it can bring a clear and delicate, real color, light and shade flagship quality image experience for high-end smart phone main photography.
Moat - patents and technology
Domestic chip companies are in a similar situation, and in the end there are several big moats. The first is the founder. Xu Chen has a strong foundation in the technical level, from Tsinghua undergraduate exposure to semiconductor technology, to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as a doctoral research direction in CMOS. After graduation, he joined the first company in the world to launch commercial CIS chips, engaged in the research and development of Pixel components, the most important component in CIS development, during which he developed and applied for nearly 30 patents. Since then, Xu Chen has accumulated rich experience in research and development and management in international factories.
At the same time, the founder, as the flag of the entire team, needs to have ultra-high acuity to the market and the judgment of the trend, the strategy is biased, and the technology is also empty hate.
At the beginning of its establishment, Xu Chen fully investigated the market and made two kinds of decisions, the first is the technical level, predicted the industry trend of CIS replacing CCD, and predicted the technical trend of BSI (backlighting technology) replacing FSI (front-lighting technology). The second is the app market. Xu Chen, who started his business, said: "There are many directions for pure technology innovation, but only the innovation that can organically integrate the practical application of users is truly valuable innovation." Early cut into the security, and then to the back of the car and smart phone market, are stepping on the era of market demand.
Another moat is the capital favor, on May 20, 2022, Steway officially logged in to the science and technology board, and now looking back, the window period of the science and technology board listing is in those two years, and the failure of most enterprises has become a major basic plate of Steway. Before the listing, Steway has been the company by the national Integrated circuit Fund, Hubble innovation and other investment companies, in the prospectus, the company's upstream partners including Samsung, Hynix, etc., downstream customers including millet, Haikang also made strategic investments in it.
In addition, there is a big moat at Sturway - technology accumulation. There is a data half a year ago, that is, as of June 30, 2024, the company has obtained a total of 98 overseas patent authorization, 110 domestic invention patent authorization, and 234 domestic utility model patents. It's worth mentioning that we have a unique SFCPixel® technology, which achieves higher voltage with the same electrons by placing the SF (Source Follower) closer to the PD (PhotoDiode), resulting in higher sensitivity and better night vision imaging. This technology has been applied to CMOS image sensors in security, mobile phone and other applications, especially in the main camera of the mobile phone, effectively improving the clarity of night vision photos. In addition to the product technology innovations mentioned above, in AI machine vision, Steway is the first manufacturer in the world to combine BSI and global shutter technology. The full name of BSI-GS is backlighting global shutter, and the company is the only one in China to achieve large-scale production of this process for consumption. Also because of the blessing of AI technology, AI glasses, AIPC, humanoid robots, which are the technical products of the current wind, will become the future power point of Steway.
In retrospect, Steway is a master, the security field, smart phones, cars three high market capacity to stand firm. To laying out the AI of the future. The prediction of strategy requires the overall grasp of market and technology. In previous years, Steway was once slightly tired due to inventory problems, and in 2024, it turned a loss into a profit through market adjustment. In the rapidly changing several major markets, it is very testing the company's concentration and decision-making power. With the deepening of technology, more and more product types, the company's accumulated deposits will become the base of eating a larger market cake, but also the bargaining chip in the next market.
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