Xiaomi 12S Ultra BoM breakdown shows that the 1″ sensor isn’t as expensive as other components
The Xiaomi 12S Ultra has a massive 1” Sony IMX989 sensor – that must be quite expensive, right? Well… as it turns out, no. Counterpoint Research has a breakdown and analysis of the Bill of Materials (BoM) for the phone and that sensor is not the most expensive piece of kit on the phone. Far from it, actually.
The base unit with 8GB of RAM and 256GB storage costs $516 or so to manufacture, but it sells for CNY 6,000 (that’s just under $900). Note that those $516 include the cost of the components, assembly, testing, intellectual property rights and the retail box contents. Separate from that are costs associated with advertising, warranty services and so on.
Qualcomm, Samsung and Sony are the component suppliers that get the biggest slices of the BoM pie. Qualcomm is the source of not only the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, but also power management components, RF transceiver and front-end components, connectivity IC and audio codec.
Samsung supplies the 6.73” LTPO E5 AMOLED panel and the 8GB LPDDR5 RAM (the amount used for this breakdown). Sony, of course, brings the image sensors for the rear camera – the aforementioned 1” IMX989, but also a pair of IMX586 sensors for the ultra wide and telephoto modules (the selfie camera sensor is an OmniVision OV32C).
Xiaomi’s performance in the CNY 6,000 segment has had its ups and downs. The company’s market share in that segment had been in a decline since the beginning of this year, but it rebounded thanks to the Xiaomi Fans Festival. According to Counterpoint, Xiaomi has shipped 2 million units of its previous camera flagship, the Mi 11 Ultra. Now the baton has been passed to the 12S Ultra.
Check out our detailed review of the Xiaomi 12S Ultra to see how those image sensors, display and chipset perform. You can also watch our video review – note that we have a separate video that focuses on just the camera.
