Maybe they don't even have a new contract, but Apple's iDevices sales are rising year after year as the market grows. They need to have the production capacity to attend the demand or Apple will find another company to do it.

They announced a 890M investment to ramp up the production of camera sensors. There goes the money!

Great. Maybe H1Z1 comes to Xbox One

I hate to say it, but this dev team was a joke. I liked the Champions games on PS2, and that's about it.

Nope. SOE died after 2005, this happened 10 years too late.

Find another company to do it?

Pardon me..LMAO, you do know out of all the companies of the world doing these CMOS sensors Sony is the largest by far with that level of optical sensors hell even Samsung use Sony CMOS sensor's there is a reason, in under 5 years Sony spent 2 billion increasing to the level they have , and its very expensive and lots of R&D costs in Time and Money, which many companies has not expaned like this for fab plant for this.

Yes other companies could in fact invest, but you are talking about a lot of time and still Sony will keep advancing further along while you are trying to catch up doing it.

Ever wonder why Sony was first to release a blu-ray optical drive for consumer use in 2003 before any other company was able to do so, because Sony was investing into Blu-Ray  required diodes back in 1997, well before most of the other companies was even starting to develop the next evolution of the optical drive for HD content to expand over DVD.

Yes, I know they are the largest. But you don't remain at the top if you just keep cruise speed and enjoy the view. If they don't have the production capacity to attend the consumers, they will at least get a minor percentage of their phones out with different sensors. So that's what they are doing, being sure that they can provide alll the sensors for everyone and keep the competition small.

I know they just invested money into that operation with the sensors. Doesn't really pertain to my post though. The SOE deal by itself is something where Sony gets an injection of cash flow now but potentially misses out on a lot more later (from SOE). But if they needed that cash flow for this investment and had to sell off a studio to get it, maybe that is something people should worry about, if they want to be worried about something.

Cruise speed? Do you see other companies spending that kind of cash to increase that fab production level, let alone overcome the yield problems that come along with it, never mind the 3 to 6 times the investment costs to establish the production silicon as a 3D stacked TSV ?

This is not what many think you can just dump a ton of money in and boom you catch up. It takes many years of development and a hell of a lot of engineers to boot.

Its not cruise control that's for sure in my opinion..its not just production capacity but also method of production and the time it took to develop such methods.

Calm down and read what I wrote, man. They would be in cruise speed IF they weren't ramping up production. They are increasing their capacity because they know they will need it. They are doing the right thing.

My point is, if Apple said "we need 50M sensors thie years" and Sony answered "Sorry, we can give you just 35M", do you think Apple would just sell 15M less sensors and be OK with that? Sony wants to be sure that if Apple asks 50M and ends up needing 60M, they will provide everyone on schedule. You don't expend 1B on something if you aren't needing it.

It's not like "boom" someone catches up with them. But not investing now would create an opening. In the 90s they left an opening in the electronics market for Samsung and LG. It started with a tiny opening and now Sony has all these financial problems because of that. So about CMOS, they aren't willing to let any opening and are putting their money there to make sure it won't happen.