BCN Ranking post-mortem analysis

The BCN rankings came out and I'm sure they will surprise some people.

We are going to break down the two interchangable lens camera rankings a bit further to show some trends and drill a little deeper into the data than the overall summary report.

I find the mirrorless marketshare over time to be an interesting chart because you see what the newer entries of Nikon, Canon and Fuji did to the mirrorless marketshare post 2011.

In 2011, the big three companies were really the only three, with the three of them taking up 97.9% of the market. 

However In 2012, we can see the impact immediately as the top three only held 73.2% of the market, with the remaining going to other mirrorless companies (Fuji, Canon and Nikon as all three entered the market)

Pansonic being the significant surprise as it bled marketshare from it's high in 2011 of 29.1% to falling completely out of the top 3 in 2015.  (To be fair, Panasonic could be keeping it's ~11% marketshare consistently as a #4 place finisher and we'd never know it).

Canon is the relative newcomer in the two three going from less than 11.9% in 2015 to 21.3% this last year.  Looking at 2014 onwards, that's the most significant growth of any of the top three mirrorless manufacturers selling in Japan.

What's more surprising about the results from last year is that Canon managed to gain from the year prior (2016 results).  They weren't supposed to.  The other manufacturers had shortages throughout the year because of the Sony fabrication issues caused by the Kumamoto earthquake. This year was supposed to be a rebound year, and anyone betting would have easily put Canon down to #3. The fact that Canon gained marketshare against it's competitors who this year didn't have supply problems should start to worry other mirrorless manufacturers.

If the mirrorless market looks something mixed up and confusing, the DSLR trend is downright great if you are Canon.  Not so much for anyone else.

Canon here takes it's marketshare from a 2011 low of 46.3% to a high of 63.3% in 2016 in a earthquake year to a still overly dominant 61.1% this past year.

This is the trend that was expected for mirrorless with Canon taking a slight step back this year in both DSLR and Mirrorless marketshares.  Nikon makes a bit of a rebound this year, but the trendline still doesn't look that rosey for the black and yellow team.

As you can see from the above graph, Sony went from modest sales to basically being non-existant (the last two years having .3% each year), while Pentax maintains a pretty constant sales throughout the reported years.