Did Olympus choose the worse possible time to sell their business?
As you can see from this latest Cipa data the camera market sales crashed by 72% in May. Now what’s the bargaining power for Olympus when selling the business to JIP? I think they might have chosen the worse possible year to sell their imaging business…for three reasons:
- This year sales will be terrible but 2021 sales will obviously look much better
- The 10 year long Camera market shrinking was expected to reach the bottom this year anyway. From now on sales are expected to stay steady (Source: Canon estimates)
- Olympus just made the massive investment to move the factory from China to Thailand. And from 2021 they could expect to have steady sales for a lower production cost
I still have the crazy hope Olympus will at the end decide to NOT sell the business to JIP….