CIPA February 2025: Strong Shipments

CIPA sent out its numbers for February 2025, and the numbers overall look quite good, showing excellent growth through all regions. When I first opened the report, I wondered if camera manufacturers were just getting ahead of the looming tariff war, and at least for February, that does not seem to be the case.

It was a great month for the camera manufacturers.

For the entire market, shipments of cameras with built-in lenses grew by 10.9%, and interchangeable lens cameras grew by 27%, showing quite a strong amount of growth. Surprisingly, DSLRs also had a good month, having shipped 27% more than a year prior.  But to be fair, 27% of nothing is still nothing.

Regionally, the focus was on shipping to China, as mirrorless shipments were 78.8% larger than the year prior and 34.8% greater than January and February combined. There was some movement as well in the Americas, but not as much as I thought, with mirrorless shipments increasing by 21.3% for the two months and only 7.2% greater than February 2024.

Overall, when we include cameras with built-in lenses, the overall shipments for February grew by 18.6% over 2024.

A Welcomed CIPA Reporting Change

Starting this month (and they retroactively went back and changed January's report as well), CIPA is now splitting out full-frame and APS-C ILC (interchangeable lens cameras) and reporting on 35mm versus smaller than 35mm shipment volumes as well.  This is fantastic and gives us a good idea of what is being shipped where, and what people of various regions are generally looking for.

For instance, Japan seems to have a higher proportion of cameras shipped with sensors smaller than 35mm compared to elsewhere.

So, for this year, almost 2:1 more APS-C (and smaller) cameras were shipped than their full-frame camera brethren. This is even considering the camera manufacturers' push for full-frame systems over their crop cameras.

I think this will be a very interesting data point to watch in the future, and how it trends over the months and years.  Right now, with only two months' worth of data, it's hard to make any conclusions yet.