Sales numbers for cameras and lenses tend to be freely available in Japan, which is something lacking in the rest of the world, especially Europe and North America.
BCNRetail has released its market share numbers for the 12 months between April 2018 through to March 2019.
Manufacturer market share leaderboard:
- Canon 37.3%
- Nikon 26.7%
- Sony 13.1%
- Olympus 6.0%
- Fujifilm 5.8%
Canon maintains a big lead in market share for cameras.
Year-over-year sales growth/decline leaderboard:
- Fujifilm +19.4%
- Canon -1.3%
- Sony -6.6%
- Olympus -13.8%
- Nikon -15.0%
Fujifilm was the big winner year-over-year, and Canon saw a slight decline in sales. Nikon had the biggest falloff.
You can check out the full report over at BCNRetail.
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Fujifilm deserves lots of praise for the innovations and packaging of their cameras, they've really been doing well an their sales growth is certainly reaping the benefits. However I think a certain percentage of the -6.6 percent for Sony is the wave of consumers seeing the praise for Fujifilm for the majority of the year and buying a camera from them, and not from sony which was the previous 'It' camera manufacturer. However this sales data ended before the firmware really hit for continuous eye focus and before the newer a6400. These numbers are the overall market, which is still 60-70% cameras under $1000. Obviously Nikon is the hardest hit in this market, especially since they have less of a presence at the low end.
That is the position Sony is in now.
Nikon shot themselves in the foot when AF came of age and refused to give up on the old antiquated mount and just kept trying to patch things on to it. They have never recovered from that big mistake.
Canon with the RF mount kept all the features of the EF so owners don't get screwed where the Nikon Z mount leaves a lot of the dozen different F mount variants in the cold except for the latest few.
The truth is camera companies have been pushing their products upmarket
so as to get the biggest chunk of profit out of each individual sale.
This has been going on for years and has been well documented,
at least in Nikon's case, by Thom Hogan and interviews of Nikon's execs published at The Imaging Resource.
To follow their analogy, more fish are living in the same pond,
so each sale counts much more for the company's bottom line than what it did 10 years ago
during the DSLR boom. The pond has gotten smaller, so they are stuffing each camera model
with every posible feature to hit that maximum price range within their calculations.
Example: Nikon D500 and that $2,000 initial price release.
Market share shows little in that respect.
Canon ended the year there at about even. Not bad for a declining market. Major concern for Olympus and Nikon though. Can they reverse those drops?
There was a recent thread about a photographer who was dumped from the Canon Explorers program and went to Olympus. I wonder if Olympus is trying to carve out a niche among aging bird and wildlife photographers who are looking for an alternative to big, heavy full frame lenses and cameras. It might be a good strategy, but on the other hand, a $3,000 4/3rds camera is probably a difficult sell unless it's image quality is nothing short of miraculous.
It was just another example of short term gains on all sides - only people to come out ahead were financial firms like Fidelity who pushed for the merger and made a quick buck. The chairman of Hoya was dismissed by the board just hours before the merger was pushed through because he wouldn't go along with buying Pentax because he thought they were overpriced and they wouldn't have the money to grow the company after.
I know, next year Sony's really going to take down Canon when [fill in the blank] comes out. You're right, firmwares will fix everything, never mind the a6400 (and a9, etc), what about the unannounced but inevitable a7000 and a10 Warthog edition?! And if that doesn't work, then wait, just wait, for the a8000 and a11 (and don't forget the a9000 and a12)! Another thing, losing 1% market share in a year means they'll have nothing in 100 years! Canon is *******!
Yeah, as I said, a sad case. It was a great company when Honeywell imported them, so long ago. But I also think that Olympus is killing itself.