Canon today released their 2023 financials and the outlook in Camp Canon is bright and sunny. Canon overall had a net sales increase of 3.7% for fiscal 2023 when compared to 2022. This translated to an operating profit increase of 15.9% from 2022.
Canon says this about their imaging department for this fiscal year. Indicating that entry-level and prosumer mirrorless cameras have led the way.
In the Imaging Business Unit, sales of interchangeable-lens digital cameras, in particular mirrorless cameras like the EOS R6 Mark II, a full-frame mirrorless camera released the year before last, and the new entry-level EOS R50 and EOS R100 mirrorless cameras launched last year, remained solid. Sales of RF-series interchangeable-lenses remained solid as well. Sales of network cameras increased thanks to solid demand and enhanced sales activity against the background of diversifying applications. These factors resulted in total sales for the business unit of ¥861.6 billion, a year-on-year increase of 7.2%.
Canon also expects that the market overall will continue to be solid because of mirrorless cameras.
As for interchangeable-lens digital cameras, demand is expected to remain solid due to the shifting of demand to mirrorless cameras.
So how did Canon do? Well, that's a bit tricky this year as importantly and disappointingly Canon has changed the format that they have followed for around the last 10 years. Usually, they give us an overall look of the market, allowing us to estimate the overall Canon market share. This year the information was extremely vague and didn't include Canon's estimate for the overall market.
If we look at last quarter's speech summary from October 2023 they state;
The interchangeable lens camera market remains solid, with new products from each company stimulating demand. As a result, we expect the market to be 5.85 million units this year, which is slightly larger than last year.
If we look at CIPA's numbers for last year, up to and including November there were 5.56 million units shipped, and traditionally around 300-400 thousand units shipped in December. So I think it's fair to say that Canon's 3rd quarter guess was in the right ballpark, at 5.85 million.
Canon states that its mirrorless market share has increased and that it sold 2.88 million units last year. Cameras overall (which include compacts as well) had a very small .9% growth rate year on year.
We raised our mirrorless camera ratio and slightly expanded overall sales of interchangeable-lens cameras to 2.88 million units.
In summary, that means that it's very plausible that Canon's market share slightly increased from last year – from 48.9% to 49.2%, as the market remained pretty flat from 2022.
Here's the data for the Imaging Department, as you can see some pretty good numbers with increases in cameras, network cameras, net sales, and operating profit.
If we look historically we can see that for the most part Canon has kept its market share consistent since 2016 which is incredible given the market disruption and the pivot to mirrorless.
One thing to note, just because I see this mentioned a lot in the forums – a portion of Canon's unit sales is still DSLRs. Canon doesn't share their split between mirrorless and DSLR, but it could be that a substantial amount of their unit sales is still from DSLR sales. CIPA reports that up to November, there were around 1.08 million DSLRs shipped. With only two vendors selling most of the DSLRs, it is plausible that a sizable portion of Canon sales are still DSLRs, especially if the alarming drop in sales in Japan for Nikon is any indication of the global market.
We can see that the overall market seems to be very slowly rebounding and Canon remains the dominant market position for cameras. I think generally it was a positive year for Canon, from imaging to the other divisions, as Canon is executing multiple pivots at the corporate level. Canon's pivot to mirrorless will hopefully continue to be a success story for Canon.
Source: Canon Financials
Top Image: Image Credit
e.g.
R8+200-800 is best value combination, in territory, where phones just won\'t be able to compete for long-long years ahead.
:ROFLMAO:
Well, it's not all sunshine, puppies and roses.
the fact remains we really don't know how much of that market share percentage is on life support and soon to be discontinued stock, and how much of it is healthy aka RF mount.
And this is just in: the 250D was supposed to be the 1Dx3, but Canon renamed it, FACT!
- 2019 - 53.6%
- 2020 - 44.8%
- 2021 - 41.5%
- 2022 - 30.8%
- 2023 (11 months) - 19.2%
Now, consider what has happened to Canon's market share over that same period – I won't list it, as you know it's remained just under 50% even as the market fraction of DSLRs has shrunk to less than half of what is was (and the ILC market as a whole has contracted significantly, as well). You've even predicted that Canon saw a slight gain in overall market share in 2023.What makes you think that Canon rolled through the 11% drop in the DSLR market from 2021-2022 and the 12% drop from 2022-2023 without a hiccup but will now suffer from the next (rather predictable) drop?
Worth noting that Canon is predicting a 3% drop in camera unit sales for 2024, but a 3.8% increase in revenue. Since the DSLRs being sold currently are at the bottom end of the price spectrum, that suggests Canon is planning for further contraction of DSLRs that will be more than offset by the increased revenue from the higher-priced mirrorless models.
CIPA releases an estimate of the overall market once a year. When released, we can use that (for 2024 as a whole) number. Perhaps Canon got in trouble for releasing estimates that were less accurate than CIPA.
I guess that's what happens when you don't have third-party lens competition. :)
I never had any idea why Canon would publicly estimate the overall market.
They were doing their competition a favor.
Sony used to show how big the market was too - until their piece of the pie got a lot smaller ;)
The sources cited were statista and dpreview. I can post them aswell if anyone is interested. Maybe you were referring to only MILC and not ILC in general? Also AI can sometimes provide false numbers, so take these with a grain of salt.