MEMS Industry: Desperately Seeking a Second Wind

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

OUTLINES:

• 2015: a year of contrast for the MEMS devices manufacturers.
• Radio-frequency front-end module applications are driving the growth of Avago and Qorvo.
• InvenSense has been one of the few inertial sensor companies to grow revenues strongly in 2015...
• By contrast, several companies have faced revenues decreases, including Canon, Sony (mainly due to currency fluctuation), STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, Epson and Panasonic...
• Now ranked 25th, TSMC became one of the top 30 MEMS companies for the first time.
• To be in the top 30 MEMS companies, the minimum sales level was $74M, compared to $65M in 2014 – a 14% increase in a single year. MEMS obviously remains a very dynamic industry

Against a particularly difficult international setting, the year 2015 saw some MEMS companies like Texas Instruments, Hewlett Packard, Panasonic and Canon suffering from strong competition and pressure from markets. However, others stood out and are ranking in Yole Développement’s annual MEMS manufacturers list with impressive market growths in 2015 compared to 2014. These include Avago Technologies, Qorvo and some MEMS microphones companies to name a few, are part of this second group.

MEMS players are depending heavily on their markets (consumer, automotive, medical industry) as well as on other factors and are developing their own strategies by combining market needs, economic constraints and innovative business models and technologies.

Yole Développement (Yole), the “More than Moore” market research and strategy consulting company presents its annual MEMS manufacturers ranking.

A continuing trend in the consumer industry

In the same market segment, Qorvo, the US-based company also grew up nicely in 2015. Yole estimates a +29% increase in revenues compared to 2014 thanks to Qorvo’s SMR technology.

In parallel, microphone applications were the second most successful market segment in the 2015 consumer industry, announces Yole. And some companies clearly bear out this finding. While the leader in the MEMS microphones market segment, Knowles Electronics had a medium growth in 2015, compared to 2014 (+5.9% increase in revenues), AAC and Goertek recorded on their side, higher growth rate: with +21.7% and +11.5%, respectively.

“Such results are mainly due to good Infineon’s microphones performances and the trend for adding more and more value to the smartphone audio,” comments Dr Eric Mounier, Principal Analyst, MEMS & Sensors at Yole. “Both companies chose to use Infineon Technologies’ products to develop their microphone’s solutions.”

And he adds: “At Yole, we expect a lot of innovations in the world of audio. MEMS technology is clearly a way to improve microphones quality and performances.”  

The analysis of the consumer industry would not be complete without a comment on fabless company InvenSense. Indeed, the US-based company showed the largest growth in 2015 revenues, +33,2% higher compared to 2014, reaching approximately US$ 438 million revenues in 2015, ranking just after Avago Technologies and before Qorvo.

“Such result has not been achieved without compromises such as lower prices and loss of profitability”, asserts Jean-Christophe Eloy, Yole’s President & CEO. And he adds: “Nevertheless, InvenSense is the only inertial sensor company which was able to grow that much in 2015; more than 33% growth. Compared to its main competitors in the consumer inertial sensor market, such growth is very significant. InvenSense is now almost the same size in the consumer markets as STMicroelectronics (STM) and Robert Bosch (Bosch). This certainly paves the way for further business increases in 2016”.

And TSMC’s 2015 foundry results are of course linked to the growth of its partner InvenSense: The Taiwanese foundry confirms its expansion with +29,2% growth in revenue.

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