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11 Feb 2026
LED and photonics powerhouse also cutting its use of gold following recent surge in prices of precious metals.
Austria-headquartered ams Osram, now ranked as the market leader in packaged LEDs, has revealed plans to cut around 2000 jobs - half in Europe - as it looks to sharpen its focus on advanced “digital photonics” technologies.
Announced during the company’s latest full-year financial results presentation for 2025, the decision is expected to reduce annual costs by approximately €200 million, with company executives also looking to improve productivity through the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI).
CEO Aldo Kamper told an investor conference call that a strong finish to the year saw the firm deliver full-year sales of €3.3 billion, down slightly on the 2024 total amid intense competition in the automotive sector, where ams Osram has long been a key player.
“Last year marked an important step towards creating the leader in digital photonics,” said Kamper, adding that the company’s earlier cost-cutting efforts had taken effect one year faster than planned - improving profitability despite what he called “heavy” market headwinds.
“Design win traction remained excellent with more than €5 billion in new lifetime value added to the pipeline.”
Focus sharpened
Following recent divestments - most obviously last week’s announcement that Infineon would be acquiring ams Osram’s non-optical and mixed-signal sensing business for €570 million - Kamper highlighted the firm’s sharpened focus on photonics, saying:
“We [are] fully focus[ed] on our future as the digital photonics powerhouse - uniquely positioned to capture the major digital photonics inflection points in automotive, AR smart glasses, biosensing, robotics, AI data center interconnects, and beyond."
Company CFO Rainer Irie also noted how recent volatility in the price of precious metals and rare-Earth materials had impacted the ams Osram bottom line, telling investors:
“Gold is an important material in the production of LEDs. You need it for corrosion-free mirrors to get the light out of the epi-layers, to put it simply. In normal years, that adds a high double-digit million euro figure to our cost of goods sold.
“[But] the unprecedented gold rally that accelerated in 2025 cost us an additional €35 million. The peak has come down in the last ten days, but when assuming an average price of about $5000 per ounce, we have another €60 million cost to add on compared with 2025 - that would be a 4 per cent margin impact for [our] optical semiconductors business.”
To mitigate that cost impact, ams Osram is hedging its gold holdings and reducing its overall use of precious metals through product redesigns, as well as making the latest job cuts.
Growth vectors
While the elevated gold price will continue to drag on profit margins this year, Kamper said that he is expecting a series of “digital photonics” growth applications to kick in over the coming years and drive the ams Osram business.
Those include micro emitter arrays that are expected to transform three key markets: namely advanced automotive; AR displays for next-generation smart glasses; and optical links for so-called AI data center “scale-up”.
“For each of these, we see additional revenue potential in triple-digit million euros territory over a staggered period of time,” the CEO said. “On the sensor side, we are equally well positioned. Spectral sensing is already a triple-digit-million business today, and we see it growing further.”
Typical applications in smart phones and wearable technologies are expected to include biosensing, as premium devices add more optically measurable biomarkers like blood pressure monitoring.
Those trends are set to be complemented by time-of-flight sensors used in robotics and emerging “humanoid” platforms, with hopes that adoption will drive significant revenues for ams Osram by 2030.
“Together, these [growth] vectors demonstrate how our unique portfolio of emitter and sensor technologies positions us at the center of major global megatrends - automotive safety, AR, AI compute, personal health, and intelligent robotics - each offering meaningful, scalable, and compounding growth potential,” Kamper concluded.
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