(news & commentary)
For the first time in a long time, Olympus published their quarterly unit sales numbers for digital cameras and broke it out by model type in their official financial publications. So, how many m4/3 cameras is Olympus selling?
- Previous Fiscal Year: 510,000 units
- Current Fiscal Year: 520,000 units (estimated)
To meet that estimate, they’ll have to increase their sales in the current quarter over last year, by the way. In terms of the overall camera market, we can now calculate exact market shares against CIPA numbers, just as we do for Nikon. For 2014 that number would be:
- 15.2% market share of mirrorless cameras
- 3.6% market share of interchangeable lens cameras
For their full fiscal year ending March 31st, Olympus expects to lose 7.5b yen selling cameras (possibly higher due to the way they mask SG&A expenses). The good news is that’s down from a 9.2b yen loss the previous year, but sales are down 6%, too ;~). The startling figure in Olympus’ announcements was that camera inventories still appear to be at 4.7 months worth of product.
Another tidbit gleaned from their financial reports, Q&A, and interviews about their business is that camera sales for them are Japan/Euro centric at the moment. Asia is a smaller piece of their imaging sales than Europe, for instance, and North America is half the size in sales of even the Japan home market.
