Canon President is pessimistic about the ILC market over the next two years

Canon President Fujio Mitarai was interviewed by Nikkei, and was generally pessimistic about the long term growth potential of the overall ILC marketplace.

More and more, Canon is seeing the market disappear with more sophisticated smartphones entering the market.

People usually shoot with smartphones (smartphones). Although the digital camera market will continue to fall for about two years, professionals and high amateurs (advanced users) use about 5 million to 6 million. I will hit the bottom there.

We should mention that during the film era, there was never more than 5-6 million cameras sold to the general public, it appears that the market is going to contract to the same volume as what the film era had before.  Even during that time, Canon created many loved cameras and certainly high technology lenses for the EF mount, so it's not as if Canon will stop doing what it's doing with ILC's.

Some assume that mirrorless will generate a new golden age of ILC's however Canon is simply seeing mirrorless replacing DSLR's with no added growth.

In our company cameras have declined at around 10% a year (sales volume) in the past few years (combined with single lens reflex and mirrorless) The world market for interchangeable lens cameras is around 10 million, but decreased The mirrorless product is growing, but it is a replacement with a single lens reflex, it is not adding to the market as a whole .

It's difficult to make predictions to what Canon will do with the camera segment, Fujio mentioned that Canon will increasingly look to corporate customers versus end-user consumers for their camera technology.  We've seen that shift as well, with an ever-increasing number of patent applications dealing with automotive and other industrial applications for camera sensors.  Canon is also looking forward by their recent investments in other company aquisitions such as Toshiba Medical, Axis and others.

We have acquired companies such as Osse in the Netherlands for commercial printing and Axis Communications in Sweden with surveillance cameras.The replacement of the business portfolio has fallen by the end of the year at the acquisition of former Toshiba Medical Systems, a medical device, now we are reinforcing that By around 20-21 years, new business such as industrial printing and medicine will grow and will compensate for the negative of products for individuals. "

In two days time, we'll see Canon's financials for 2018, which should give us a good look at how the market is doing from Canon's perspective.  Canon is usually good at breaking down how well their camera systems have sold versus the market.  We know from our CIPA analysis that if anything, Canon and Nikon going with the EOS R and also the Nikon Z mount has done nothing but caused a disruption and decrease in the overall market.  It seems that Canon is thinking that is more a long term symptom of the market, and not momentary as the market adjusts to the two new mounts.

Usually, Canon is pretty optimistic in its forecasts, so for the largest manufacturer of ILC's to come out and predict a 50% market loss over the next two years is certainly worrisome for the market overall.