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An analysis about the present and future of Panasonic and Olympus (by Thom Hogan)

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I want to focus your attention on the latest article from Thom Hogan (Click here to visit the website). He starts with the following statement: “Welcome to the beginning of the end of the digital SLR era.” The “DSLR unit sales have been flat and appear about to fall. Revenue per unit has fallen. Household penetration for DSLRs peaked some time ago, and much of the market now is replacement, not new sales.

He described the situation of all non Nikon and non Canon camera companies. I am going to copy the Panasonic/Olympus part only. Please read his article to read the full text at bythom.com.

Olympus/Panasonic: made a big bet on m4/3 taking the DSLR initiative away at the low end. Both pretty much neglected or abandoned any traditional DSLR approach to do so, which on Olympus’ side has alienated customers. Both increased their overall interchangeable lens camera sales significantly with their strategy, but at a lower price point. Still, they haven’t really blunted the low-end Canon and Nikon DSLR sales, they augmented them. Status: tenuous foothold at the low end, very tenuous above that. Forecast: continued tough road ahead.

What do you think about his opinion? I added the latest sales analysis graph made by BCNranking about the Japanese system camera market shares. As you can see on the graph (see image on top of the post) 69% of all sold system cameras are DSLR’s and 31% are Mirrorless. Mirrorless market share reached the top in December 2011 with 36,7%. But my guess is that market share has fallen because there wasn’t any real new product (only the slightly upgraded [shoplink 18844]E-PL2)[/shoplink]. And the lens repertory from all current mirrorless system is still “immature”. I predict a further advancement of the Mirrorless market after the June announcements (Panasonic, Olympus, Sony and Samsung will release new cameras and lenses).

P.S.: You can see on Amazon that most cameras in the TOP 20 are compacts and DSLR cameras. Mirrorless is still not so popular as in Japan:
Amazon US rankings (Click here)
Amazon DE rankings (Click here)
Amazon UK rankings (Click here)
Amazon FR rankings (Click here)
Amazon IT rankings (Click here)

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