Canon 2Q 2022 Financials

Canon released its financials today, and it paints a good picture of the company’s post-COVID-19 recovery. Supply shortages still give an uneven view of the company and what its strategic direction is going forward, as there is still so much triage happening as supplies remain hard to come by.

Echo’ed throughout the report is the fact that Shanghai’s COVID lockdown bothered Canon more than we knew as they struggled with supply shortages.  Here’s hoping that China relaxes it’s zero-covid policy and that helps with bringing more stability to the global supply chain.

Canon's overall operating profit for the quarter increased from a year ago by 27.4% but because of the rapid deprecation of the yen, overall the net income before taxes ended up decreasing by .7%.  I suspect we will see this from all of the Japanese companies as they report this quarter.

For imaging, the main driver this quarter was network cameras (security and the like) posting a significant gain in the number of units and also sales.  ILCs still posted a healthy increase in sales in terms of dollars, but a significant lowering of unit sales from a year ago.  Canon blames this on the supply shortages focusing them to work on higher yield units that deliver the most profits.  As it stands, it worked for Canon in the imaging department and has posted a whopping 54.8% increase in operating profit (20.9 to 32.4 billion yen) from a year ago.

Canon still overall is projecting a slight increase in the number of units sold this year (around 2.8 million) for an increase of 2% from a year ago, and they are expecting the overall market to be around 5.45 million units.  Thus, Canon expects to have somewhere around a 51% market share this year.