Dublin firm Research and Markets has, like everyone else, been taking a close look at camera phone manufacturing and its global distribution. And boy is it distributed globally. Apparently the three largest phonecam module makers—Primax, Premier and Chicony—are Taiwanese and control more than 40% of the market. Add to that smaller Taiwanese manufacturers, and more then 60% of the global phonecam assembly business is concentrated on the island.  The Taiwanese don't make sensors, though. For low-end CMOS sensors, they have to go to the U.S. and South Korea, which dominate that market. And for CCDs they have to go to Japan, which makes more than 90% of the worlds CCDs. For processing power, phonecam module makers come back to the US again, where TI, Qualcomm, and Zoran dominate the "back-end chip" market. For lenses there are two choices: if you want plastic, talk to the Taiwanese; if you want glass, talk to the Japanese. Got it? Good. There will be a test later.

Of course, this may not be very useful information unless you're building camera phones in your spare time, but it's an interesting insight into the global nature of the technology in out hands, especially since the many of these same parts (or their big brothers) are going into non phone-based cameras.