Sony spent 4.9 billion on R&D last year, Canon spent 2.6 billion.
Sony's market cap is 153 billion.
Canons market cap is 29 billion.
Do you really think that Canon entering the mirrorless market sooner could slow Sony's R&D?
It could have had the opposite effect, if you are trying to take over a market you do not spend less when someone else gets in the arena. You have to spend to win.
Canon is predominately a imaging company including medical, scanning and printing. Cameras and lenses are core businesses for Canon but only represent ~12% of revenue as per John's analysis.
Sony is one of the most comprehensive media companies
- the largest video game console company
- the largest video game publisher
- one of the largest music companies (largest music publisher & second largest record label)
- third largest film studio
- the largest player in the premium TV market for a television of at least 55 inches (>$2,500)
- the second largest TV brand by market share
- the third largest television manufacturer in the world by annual sales figures.
Further down the list... Sony has
- 55% market share in the image sensor market and is the largest manufacturer of image sensors
- the second largest camera manufacturer
Takesome1 provided that ~12% of revenue from both these segments which would be ~ the same as canon's cameras.
Sony has probably been able to share R&D costs from their image sensor division and probably also image processing (sharing engineering between Playstation and Bionz).
Sony made a play for the camera market by buying Minolta and have built it up from there.
IF a big company tries to enter a market segment and has limited success over time whilst bleeding R&D and marketing dollars that they could use elsewhere then they will sell the business unit off to the highest bidder. The corporate world is littered with examples. For instance, I expect Sony to sell or close down their mobile phone manufacturing soon. Betamax and the many Sony proprietary memory/recording formats have died a slow death.
Sony would likely retain the image sensor business even if they sold their camera business due to their market strength (and I assume profitability)