2015 Outlook on the Shipment Forecast by Product-Type Concerning Cameras and Related Goods

It would seem the camera market is a tough place to be at the moment. According to the CIPA press release.. link

It's been a tough place to be for a while.

I've been saying this for a while. The camera business is tough, damned tough and it will get tougher, In five years time we will see something quite different, There will be casualties and there will be consolidation, It is difficult to know who is best placed. Out and out camera businesses or those where the camera business forms a significant part of revenues are particularly vulnerable. Pentax is interesting - it is basically in the Ricoh financial statements under 'other', which could well be a very good thing. Might we see Olympus go bust - easily. Panasonic will snap them up. Might we see the demise of Nikon? - they are trying their best to shore up profits by shifting more focus to the medical business.

There will be interesting times. What is absolutely required is innovation and some kind of insulation from a rapidly (very rapidly) shrinking marketplace. I think Fuji are currently doing all the right things. Ricoh's imaging division could well be just fine. There wiil be some exciting product announcements soon, there is an opportunity there. I'd certainly put more money on Pentax at the moment than Nikon.

If one had to choose a company based upon what could be publicly traded stock, but only in cameras...

I'd place most all of my chips with Nikon. Take a look at the near future for Nikon. Nikon will soon release an entry level full frame that is priced almost directly with what will eventually replace the Pentax K3.

Also, the business is not all that tough. Take a look at the Sony company. The company overall is doing terrible, but their consumer cameras... Take a look at what Sony cameras used to be like ten to fifteen years ago, and where they are today. Sony also offers quite the variety of cameras; even full frame, and even mirrorless. And Sony excels at mirrorless, where Pentax has failed at it.

I see both Sony and Nikon as taking initiative and taking the lead. I see Pentax cameras as losing market share at an unbelievable rate.

You would place all your chips on a company whose profits have fallen 20% since last year.

If the investment was only in camera related technology... One again has to remember that ONLY as camera technology goes, that Nikon and Sony are both running circles around Pentax.

In terms of finances of the entire company goes though... Sure Nikon takes a temporary hit, but then again take a look at the entire investment field such as NYSE. But then again, when people invest their entire retirements and even countries do the same, that's a recipe for disaster. Which is why one happens to see so many people still having the need to work at over age eighty; not the desire to work, but the need.

Nikon will be around far longer than Pentax ever will. Why does everyone think there was a Pentax Ricoh type of merger?

Have broadly to agree with 50mpCMOS, while not minimising the difficulties faced by the likes of Nikon. There may be some cushioning to be had from being a small part of a large company, but that will be temporary unless the financial prospects look good. Pentax is small, bordering on invisible and however good some of its products, with few exceptions, such as the 645Z, none of them is sufficiently distinct from what is already on offer from rivals with better marketing and sales operations. This is a pity, as the K5 range and the K3, eg, are excellent cameras. As a child might say, 'it isn't fair'. Hard to disagree.

But perhaps it's a case for us photographers of living with what we have and enjoying it. Prediction in the absence of detailed data and intimate knowledge of the industry is really no higher than loose speculation.

This is all a bit speculative, but here's my pennyworth. Sony might have more technical progress but the sensors (and maybe much else) in Pentax are from Sony - why spend a fortune on development when you can buy someone else's? Take a look inside a B&O tv and the gubbins are (or were) Panasonic. Smart phones are taking the portable camera market so it will be the pocket cameras that suffer more than the serious market. I don't suppose cameras were ever really big profit lines, this coming from add-ons - i.e. the Kodak and Polaroid philosophy of making money from film sales with low-priced easy to use cameras as the incentive. Maybe there is a comparison with the hifi market from a few years ago, where are the middle market names like Sansui now? It has polarized into the likes of Sony at one end and small specialists at the other.

There's a lot of speculation and opinion being presented as fact in this thread. There are many things that we cannot know.

What we do know is that the camera business is as tough as any other business, and at the moment is having problems keeping growth going. Sales are actually falling and have been for some time. The cake is smaller, but that does favour the smaller players who have room to increase their share with individualistic approaches.

Pentax is doing what it has done in the past, high quality without falling into small volume niche products. They are still mainstream, but with a distinct ethos and maintaining that high quality approach. There are companies in this field in far worse positions than Pentax.