This is good news for Canon.
But..
Maintaining a dominant place in the market is a good thing, but maintaining that dominance, while the market still contracts is a little like winning first prize for music on the Titanic. So while I love to see Canon maintaining its market share – I would be far happier if the market was growing – because Canon was putting out so many great cameras that everyone and their puppies were buying a Canon camera.
That's one of the main reasons that I have always hated the counter-argument to criticism as being: But Canon is #1 in market share.
According to dclife, the updated 2023 results are as follows;
- Canon: 3.34 million units (46.5%)
- Sony: 2 million units (27.9%)
- Nikon: 810,000 units (11.3%)
- Fujifilm: 430,000 units (6.0%)
- Panasonic: 260,000 units (3.6%)
- OM Digital: 180,000 units (2.5%)
- Ricoh Imaging: 60,000 units (0.8%)
Canon has maintained its exact same market share percentage as the year prior. Also, I'm curious about the number of units, as some of them seemed to have employed a generous amount of rounding.
The total number of cameras expected to sell this year is around 7.18 million, which is slightly under last year's tally of 7.2 million.
I also would like to see Nikon pick up some market share – I think cameras do best when Canon and Nikon are trading blows and positions in the market. That's when I think we see the best out of both companies.
This market share analysis assembled by Nikkei, and performed by Techno Systems Research also includes DSLRs and compact cameras – I think if Nikon didn't just give the entire DSLR market (or what is left of it) to Canon, they would be close to, or actually in second spot with Sony still in third. I think the pivot to mirrorless hurt Nikon the most, and part of me wonders if part of that reason was that the F mount wasn't as easy to move to the Z mount as EF was to the RF. Other than that, I have no idea really why Nikon didn't execute the pivot as well as Canon.
So as compared to the other companies, Canon is doing well. I think that this shows that they still have to find more niches and more ways of selling cameras to a wider audience. But then again, so does the rest of the industry.
Source: DClife
Image Credit: Anastassia Anufrieva on Unsplash
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That's one of the main reasons that I have always hated the counter-argument to criticism as being: But Canon is #1 in market share."
For what it is worth, a few years ago I started tracking the CIPA data. At least according to that, the ILC market hitting bottom in 2020 at 5.27M units. In 2023 it was 6.16M units, a 17% increase and thus far, 2024 is on par to higher than 2023.
Since 2020
Going back to 2010, certainly the market is not where it was.
Canon please hurry in converting the RF tele macro lens patents to actual products.
The graphic in your article exactly matches the one from 2022 (e.g., see here or here).
So either there was absolutely no change at all in camera market from 2022 to 2023, or you are mistakenly believing that you’re looking at new data when you’re really just rehashing the data and discussion from one year ago.
FYI, the banner at the top of the Nikkei article you link shows an updated date of a year ago yesterday.
something happened in 2020. Not sure what it was. I think Canon and others still using supply chain is a pretty tired excuse for having fundamental problems that they simply don't want to address. the longer it takes to get cameras into people's hands, the more decide that they don't need that new camera, or new lens, etc.
as far as the market - it's still not anywhere close to pre-pandemic levels of 8.5m shipped cameras. granted the industry is still not right, but I would much rather Canon or even Nikon selling more and the market closer to 8 than it is to 6 - the pandemic hastened the end of the DSLR (and EOS-M) but Canon and Nikon still haven't convinced the vast majority of those users with DSLR's that they should continue using an ILC, and that they need a new mirrorless.
Also - shipped from Japan and sitting in Canon USA inventory is still a CIPA shipped unit. Keep that in mind too that there's a lot of inventory that isn't selling.
So, it's not like the ILC market is "doomed". More likely, it's just back to its pre-boom level.
thanks for the catch - the article is corrected and updated.
where are you getting that info? curious - because I just see film camera totals - not a separation of compact and film SLR's.
I know there's a few graphs circulating, but I've never seen them source the data.
nice. thank you. i was looking for that.
Ignoring population distribution, wealth of population, etc...the industry is inching back to where it was in 1986, with 0.1% of the population buying a "Focal Plane" camera, I am assuming an ILC. And this is with the rise of the ubiquitous smartphone and a glut of ILCs sold during the digital conversion of 2010 to 2020.
So, really, it is 2012 that stands out, as masses of people converted from film to digital. I suspect the market will grow with wealth/population/etc again.
More of a normal sustained business cycle.
In Canon's financial documents, Canon reports that they sold 2.88 million interchangeable lens cameras in 2023. CIPA reports that 5,998,913 interchangeable lens cameras shipped in 2023.
2.88/6.0 = 48%
- Canon financial document, July 25, 2024
That doesn't sound like the Titanic to me.
2023: 2.88 M / 6.00 M = 48.0%
2022: 2.86 M / 5.96 M = 48.2%
2021: 2.74 M / 5.35 M = 51.2%
2020: 2.76 M / 5.37 M = 51.5%
2019: 4.16 M / 8.46 M = 49.2%
2018: 5.04 M / 10.76 M = 46.8%
2017: 5.51 M / 11.68 M = 47.2%