CIPA Finally got around to releasing their April results and it showed some promising data for the camera industry. If you don't want to read any further. It's up. Everything is up except DSLR's. Compact cameras and Mirrorless are all showing great year-on-year gains over 2023.

CIPA's overall ILC chart is shown below and you can see that 2024 is certainly holding its own, which is especially remarkable given the delayed releases from Canon and Sony.

For compact cameras, the news is surprisingly good, with a total amount shipped 4.7% more than last year and a value of 37% more than last year. Japan still receives around 23% of all compact cameras, as we have identified in the past, it's a real thing there. Nearly 45% of all cameras shipped to Japanese retailers were compact cameras.

On the ILC (interchangeable lens cameras) front, mirrorless has completely crushed any hopes and dreams of DSLRs by having a dominant 83% market share. Camera companies (Notably I think only Canon and Pentax) have shipped around 290 thousand DSLRs as compared to the 1.45 million mirrorless cameras shipped by all Japanese manufacturers.

Now for the surprise. China is now the largest camera region in the world. It is surpassing both Europe and the Americas as the largest market.

Perhaps more important is that China is one country, whereas Europe and the Americas are multiple countries, currencies, and logistics. I thought this was only a matter of time, but it still makes me wonder what kind of changes this will bring to the camera industry. 416,013 mirrorless cameras have been shipped to China this year, 324,939 were shipped to the Americas, and 277,838 to Europe. Regarding ILCs, China edges out the Americas and Europe, even though the Americas do better as a significant amount of DSLRs is shipped to the Americas. China apparently wants nothing to do with DSLRs.

Overall for the industry, things are certainly looking up and it will be intriguing to watch what the camera companies say about the emerging stronger market of China and what growth they see there.

You can review the details from CIPA's pdf located here.

Source: CIPA

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