The scale of optical module market will continue to increase.onu epon sales

Driven by the construction of 5G base stations, cloud computing and large data centers in recent years, the market size of optical modules has increased. Although the optical module industry is developing rapidly and gradually becoming mature at this stage, from the perspective of the entire industry chain, its upstream optical devices and chips still rely heavily on foreign imports. Therefore, in the future, domestic enterprises need to invest more capital and energy in developing domestic optical devices and chips in addition to improving the performance and productivity of optical modules. This article will talk about why the optical module market scale will increase.

According to the data, the average R&D investment of domestic optical module manufacturers in the past decade accounted for more than 7% of the operating revenue. Although this is slightly lower than that of Huawei, ZTE, Fiberhome and other manufacturers, the proportion of this investment is relatively high globally, because the R&D investment of EU countries is only 2.5%.

China has the world's largest optical communication market and excellent equipment manufacturers such as Huawei and ZTE, which provides fertile soil for the growth of optical module manufacturers. Taking the telecommunications market in 2016 as an example, the number of optical components in FTTx, mobile forward and back transmission markets exceeded 115 million US dollars, with sales revenue reaching 1.7 billion US dollars, 70% of which were deployed in China; In addition, Huawei, ZTE and FiberHome ranked first, second and fifth in the global optical network equipment market with 24.6%, 13.5% and 6.5% shares, accounting for more than half.

The main application scenarios of optical modules are the telecommunications market and the data center market. The telecommunications market is mainly used for base stations/PON/WDM/OTN/switches/routers and other devices, while the data center market is mainly used for servers/overhead switches/core switches/core routers and other devices. It can be seen that the huge application market provides good development conditions for optical module manufacturers.

In the 5G communication market, the 5G base station network will evolve from a 4G/LTE BBU and RRU two-level structure to a CU, DU and AAU three-level structure. There are three reasons for the market explosion of 5G drive optical modules: First, some optical modules of the front transmission are all upgraded and replaced with 25G/40G optical modules; The second is to add intermediate transmission scenes and 50G/100G intermediate transmission modules; Third, the speed of the return optical module is upgraded to 100G/200G/400G.