The optical module mainly realizes the electrical-optical conversion and optical-electrical conversion of the signal at the sending and receiving ends respectively, which is widely used. From the structure of the industrial chain, the upper reaches of the optical module are mainly optical chips and passive optical devices, the optical module is in the middle of the optical communication industry chain, the market is growing steadily. Downstream customers are mainly Telecommunications main equipment makers, operators, Internet and cloud computing enterprises.
Influenced by historical reasons, developed countries such as Europe, America and Japan started earlier in technology development, so they have great technological advantages in the research and development of chips and products. By virtue of labor force advantage, China occupies a large market share in the middle of the industrial chain. China has now become a global optical module manufacturing base, which has developed from OEM and ODM mode to a number of optical module brands leading the global market share. Although the division of labor in the industrial chain improves the efficiency, it is not conducive to Chinese technological independence, and it is difficult to share the upstream market. With the advent of The 5G era and the scientific and technological war between China and the United States is intensifying, China is expected to push upstream to achieve technological breakthroughs and change the current pattern of the existing optical module industry chain.
From the point of industrial chain value, the optical communication field presents an obvious "inverted pyramid" shape. The upstream of the industrial chain, the upstream of the industrial chain, the higher the core value. The upstream chip technology determines the performance of the entire optical module, and the technical barriers and industry concentration ratio are obviously higher, occupying a large amount of cost space of the entire optical module. At the same time, with the transition from low-end to high-end optical modules, the technical difficulty of optical chip research and development will gradually increase, and the cost proportion of corresponding chips in devices will also increase, with the cost of chips in high-end devices can as high as 70%.
The domestic optical device market is gradually improving, and the industrial technological breakthrough brings about the increase of gross profit rate. With the merger and acquisition of the global optical communication industry, the ranking of the world's top 10 optical device manufacturers has changed in 2019. Chinese optical device manufacturers occupy 4 of the world's top 10 optical device manufacturers, and their market share has increased from 18.05% in 2018 to 21.78% in 2019. At the same time, due to the impact of the product structure restructuring of many optical device enterprises under the new technology breakthrough, the gross profit rate of global optical device enterprises has been improved and tends to be similar, generally maintaining between 25% and 30%.
Optical module is mainly used in telecommunications market and data market. In the telecommunications market, the main customers of optical module manufacturers are communication equipment manufacturers, and the end users are operators. The downstream users of digital communication market are mainly data centers of Internet service providers, such as BAT, Google and Amazon. In recent years, digital communication market has gradually become the main segment that drives the growth of global optical modules. The increasing capital expenditure of cloud computing manufacturers represented by Google and Amazon drives the continuous growth of the number and traffic of cloud data centers. The digital communication market has become increasingly important in the overall market in recent years.
