I'm sure that for the past 2 years or so Phase One has been making more profit than Hasselblad
Damien, I think you're getting to the heart of the issue here, it's this commercial reality that really explains why Hasselblad have taken such an aggressive stance.
I believe Phase One have about 60% of the single-shot, medium format back market. So what's Imacon's share? Obviously it can't be more than 40%, even 30% sounds high, so I'd say 20% or less. Which means Phase One are probably selling three backs or more to every one sold by Imacon.
And what about medium format SLR camera bodies? Well here it's a completely different story, Hasselblad don't have a great deal of competition at the moment so it's reasonable to assume that their share of the body market must be over 60%, I wouldn't be surprised if it was currently 80% or even higher.
But what about the relative profitability of backs and bodies? I understand that Kodak charges about $5k per sensor, which suggests to me that there's roughly $5k of gross margin in every back sale. However, I very much doubt that Hasselblad takes $5k from each sale of an H1/2 plus a couple of lenses, not after Fuji's slice. And furthermore the replacement cycle for backs is far more attractive than that for bodies. There's plenty of sexy developments still to come with backs (even if it's needed or not), but there's not too much that can be done to tempt a photographer to upgrade current bodies. I guess that professional photographer's will upgrade their backs every two to three years, but only upgrade their bodies every five to ten years.
So the profit's in backs, but Hasselblad's strength is in bodies. And that strategic truth will only grow in importance over the coming years. I doubt too many people are buying brand new, medium format cameras and lenses today with the intention of using them with film. Tomorrow it will be virtually nil. The future for the medium format SLR business is digital, and digital means backs not bodies.
Now if Victor Hasselblad was still in charge he might be swayed by sentimentality. But he's not in charge, a hard headed Hong Kong trading company called Shriro runs Hasselblad, and they'll be beating CEO Poulsen around the head saying come up with a plan to drive our back sales or we'll find someone who can. And Poulsen's strategy is very simple, he plans to strong-arm the market into Imacon backs with the H3D. If you play around with some numbers you'll see he can afford to lose quite a few body sales and still be ahead on the bottom line so long as he sells just a few more backs. I'm not privvy to Hasselblad's financial data, but taking a few eductated guesses I reckon they'll still make a lot more money if they sell a third fewer bodies but get Imacon backs on all of them.
And that, to my commercial mind if not my photographer's mind, sounds like a gamble worth taking.