With all talk of doom and gloom, I thought I’d go look to see what is actually happening at Canon. They have not released Q4 2018 yet, so this is based on Q3 estimates for 2018 (meaning these numbers are what Canon gave to shareholders as estimates using 3 quarters of actuals, and one quarter of estimates).
I had no idea what to expect, so this was illuminating for myself. Canon makes just under half of their revenue from Office, and about a quarter from Imaging. Ignoring the fact that imaging includes inkjet printers, we can expect that slice to be greatly reduced over the next two years. However, it will then be close to parity with Medical. However, if you look at profitability, Imaging is nearly twice as profitable as Medical (which was not at all what I had expected).
So if Canon hopes to offset a declining camera market, they can offset this on a dollar by dollar basis if they increase Office sales (roughly equal profit ratio). But if they want to offset it with increased Medical sales, they will need roughly $2 of new medical sales to offset every $1 lost to cameras. This also shows that Canon will still care a great deal about cameras, even at half-size, the market is still large and very profitable. Frankly, they can’t afford to just walk away.
Of course, cameras will have diminishing prestige within the company as they focus on other business units to find growth and this will impact development of new products.
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