Canon has released their financial results for the 2nd quarter of 2018, while there was continued contraction of the ILC market, it did slow for the quarter. The EOS M50 appears to have driven sales in 2Q 2018 and Canon claims they now have the #1 spot for mirrorless marketshare in Japan for the first half of 2018 and continue to increase their marketshare in other markets around the globe.
Total unit sales have fallen in line with Canon’s plan for the first half of 2018, but Canon is lowering revenue projection for the rest of the year. This is in part due to Canon’s current focus on entry level models and attracting new users to the EOS system.
It was worse news for the compact market, as Canon saw a drop of 22% to only 840,000 units for the quarter and have dropped their full year projection for the market.
Full summary and official financial documents after the break.
From the Speech Summary:
For ILCs, the rate of market contraction slowed as we entered the second quarter. This reflects the stimulation of demand through the launch of new products, both by competitors and ourselves. Against this backdrop, we managed 1.38 million in unit sales, a decline of 3% compared to last year.
In the second quarter, sales were driven by the EOS M50, a strategically positioned mirrorless camera. Despite being an entry-class model, it incorporates features found in more advanced cameras while delivering easy operation for beginners. Through this, we are bringing new users into our ILC ecosystem.
Through the launch of these types of new products, for the first half, we have secured the top market share position for mirrorless cameras in Japan and are steadily increasing our market share position in other regions.
For the second half of this year, in order to reach a broader range of customers, we will implement our plan to aggressively use social media in our marketing as a way to cultivate new users.
Additionally, we will strengthen our promotional activities targeting advanced amateurs, a growing segment of the market. At the same time, we will work to further strengthen our lineup, launching new products in the second half of this year.
From a profit perspective, we will work to further reduce costs through the acceleration of automation at domestic plants and the promotion of in-house production, including production equipment itself. At the same time, we will thoroughly reduce operating expenses. Through these measures, we will work to effect improvement in profitability from the second half on.
As unit sales in the first half of the year were in line with our plan, we decided to keep our full-year projection. From a revenue perspective, however, we lowered our projection, taking into account the increased proportion of sales coming from entry-class models that were used to cultivate new demand. This, however, also resulted in ASP decline.
As for sales of compact cameras, our unit sales decreased 22% to 840 thousand units amid continued market contraction. As the market and our unit sales were below expectations in the first half, we lowered our full-year projection for the market and our own sales from 11 to 10 million unit and from 3.4 to 3 million units, respectively.
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