Will Shield become the second supplier of under-screen fingerprint sensors for vivo and Huawei?

Tianfeng International released a market forecast today: Shield is likely to become the second supplier of under-screen fingerprint sensors for vivo and Huawei mobile phones in 2019.

Recently, the market has been overly pessimistic about the progress of Egis' promotion of under-screen fingerprint sensors in the Chinese market. However, Tianfeng International predicts that Egis, the second largest under-screen fingerprint IC design company, will ship to vivo and Huawei in mid-2019 and Q4, respectively.

       The main reasons why Shield was able to obtain the order are as follows: it has accumulated experience in solving quality problems by shipping Samsung's under-screen fingerprint products; the market shipments of under-screen fingerprint phones are growing rapidly, and manufacturers need to find a second supplier to diversify risks; and customers help improve the performance of their own algorithms.

       Egis is expected to ship the product to vivo in mid-2019 for vivo's mid-range models priced below 2,000 yuan. Based on vivo's estimated shipments of 2.5-3 million units in Q3 2019, this will account for 7-12% of vivo's under-screen fingerprint smartphone shipments in 2019. If Egis ships without any surprises, it will receive more orders from vivo in the future. It is worth mentioning that the under-screen fingerprint module shipped by Egis to vivo will be exclusively supplied by QTech.

       As for Huawei, Egis is likely to beat GigaDevice/Silead and become the second supplier of under-screen fingerprint for Huawei's Q4 2019 models. Tianfeng International predicts that among Huawei's Q4 2019 models, Goodix will still be the first supplier of under-screen fingerprint, and Egis and GigaDevice/Silead will be the second and third.

       This is because Goodix's price will definitely be higher than that of Egis and GigaDevice/Silead, but Goodix has relatively mature and market-proven under-screen fingerprint recognition software and hardware solutions, so it will still be the primary supplier of Huawei's under-screen fingerprint, and this advantage will last for at least one year.

       In addition, because Egis has been adopted by Samsung earlier and has accumulated certain experience to improve its under-screen fingerprint experience, Egis will become the second under-screen fingerprint supplier, and its promotion progress in China will be faster than GigaDevice/Silead.

       Goodix and Egis benefit from the rapid growth in shipments of under-screen fingerprint smartphones, which are expected to grow by 900–1,000% to about 280 million units in 2019. Therefore, in a fast-growing market, terminal manufacturers need to find a second supplier to spread the risk of the supply chain, which is actually beneficial to the promotion of Egis. Of course, although it can be confirmed that Egis will gain a certain market growth space, Goodix is ​​still the market leader.