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Author Topic: BCN 2018 report: camera unit sales in Japan  (Read 2405 times)

hogloff

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Re: BCN 2019 report on camera unit sales in 2018 in Japan
« Reply #20 on: January 16, 2019, 11:06:56 pm »

I am not sure about that 87%, but more to the point on what basis do you think Fujifilm has a big chunk of that? Both Olympus and Fujifilm are solely in the mirrorless market for ILCs, and those BCN ratings consistently put Olympus far ahead of Fujifilm (and Panasonic) — in Japan. Do you have any reason to think that this situation is so different outside Japan?
I agree with this part:Also: while comparing Japan, Europe and the USA — aren't we missing a large part of the world, like the rest of Asia?

If you do a bit of research yourself you'll see that Olympus imaging revenue for 6 months this past year was 24m yen whereas for Fuji it was 42m yen...so my assumptions are probably right.

Tell me, do you feel differently and if so, why so? Another tidbit...Olympus revenue took a big nosedive this year, Fuji stayed about equal.

So that data of Olympus leading in mirrorless sales in Japan is very misleading.
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Dan Wells

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Re: BCN 2018 report: camera unit sales in Japan
« Reply #21 on: January 17, 2019, 12:59:42 am »

Hopefully, that's Billion Yen (the Yen is roughly 100 to the dollar, so 42 million Yen is only a half-million dollar business)... I'm getting 127 Billion Yen last fiscal year for Fuji's electronic imaging business (source:  Fujifilm Holdings Annual Report released March 2018). This does include broadcast and cinema lenses (and a small compact camera business) as well as X/GFX, but it does not include Instax. They aren't selling a million cameras per year, but they are selling half a million or so unless most of that is broadcast stuff.

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mecrox

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Re: UPDATE: BCN Award 2019 (for 2018 unit sales in Japan)
« Reply #22 on: January 17, 2019, 06:02:47 pm »

That part is perfectly natural: what mystifies me is why instead so many folks who do not own and are not interested in Olympus or other MFT gear are nevertheless so much more active in commenting (negatively) on those systems!
It seems that Olympus likely does not see or need consumers cameras as a major money maker: medical equipment is its big game, and arguably camera development benefits that too (since medical equipment includes various internal used cameras.) And I am puzzled how you can argue that lower sales make it more affordable to stay in the DSLR business; models still need to be update every few years to stay competitive, and lower sales make it more difficult to recoup R&D costs.
Very few as far as I can tell from the sales data!

Overall, I am puzzled how you can spin the sales data into an argument for Pentax being better off than Olympus in the camera market.

No puzzle really. It’s not about sales, it’s about investment. Neither outfit sells many cameras after all. Pentax can potter along at a low level, making little but spending little too. My impression is that Olympus invest a lot more in their cameras, so a bad bet will have much more of an impact on their fortunes. That is more likely for Olympus than for Pentax because Olympus is in a more competitive and spendy part of the camera market, mirrorless. Tortoise and hare kind of thing. Ricoh’s approach with Pentax is unglamorous, but so long as sales don’t tank completely it is likely quite resilient. Pentax seem to have quite a reliable albeit modest following, perhaps because many of their users own and use legacy Pentax lenses going back many years. Oly don’t have that to fall back on, or not to the same extent.
« Last Edit: January 17, 2019, 06:27:17 pm by mecrox »
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Mark @ Flickr

BJL

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Re: UPDATE: BCN Award 2019 — Pentax vs Olympus ?!
« Reply #23 on: January 17, 2019, 07:11:07 pm »

No puzzle really. It’s not about sales, it’s about investment. Neither outfit sells many cameras after all. Pentax can potter along at a low level, making little but spending little too. My impression is that Olympus invest a lot more in their cameras, so a bad bet will have much more of an impact on their fortunes. ...
Don't get me wrong; I am not predicting doom for Pentax, and you might well be right that Ricoh can keep its Pentax division pottering along in its small, old-school, slow development state. What I find hard to swallow is yet another weird argument for pessimism about the Olympus MFT system: that somehow by choosing to invest more in product development than Pentax, selling and earning more on ILCs, and being in a product category that is gaining share within the ILC market (MILC) while Pentax is exclusively in one that is shrinking (DSLR), somehow makes Olympus' position worse!

But enough of our amateurish prognostications and investment advice; I will just wait to see whether a future "E-M5 Mk III" or "E-M1 Mk III" (not the E-M1X sports camera coming on January 24!) fits as the successor to my aging first generation E-M5 — I know that the combined Olympus and Panasonic MFT lens systems already comfortably meet and exceed my needs and desires (and lens budget), and any I own now or buy in the future  will likely serve for the rest of my days, so long as there are bodies to hang them off.
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