BCN Trends Report: Canon remaining steady

Where's the EOS RP?

BCNRetail did another trend analysis of the Mirrorless full frame market in Japan.

The Sony A7 III continues its dominance with a 39% marketshare over all other full frame mirrorless cameras.

Of course, as we said in this article, that some realism has to be applied to these marketshare reports, because they don't really tell us what is the size of the actual market.  Going by napkin math that we had back in March, the market, even though BCN says it's climbed 165% over last year, it is still, really small.

While BCN has been reporting on full frame sales since early this year, and they have a long and solid history of data; something seems amiss. According to their chart, the EOS RP held position #2 for the month with a 16.5% marketshare.  However, if we look at BCN's monthly aggregate data, the EOS RP fails to show up at all in the top 50, even though the EOS R sits with 12.3% and ranks at position 29.

Is there just so many smaller EOS RP kits floating around Japan that the aggregate is 16.5% but individually each kit isn't selling enough to crack the top 50?  Looking at mapcamera in Japan shows around 6 different EOS RP kits available, and 6 kits as well on amazon.co.jp.  It would be difficult to assume that the 16.5% would be spread more or less equally over all the various kit options, but it seems to be the only reasonable possibility.

All things considered, with the fact that it's a camera body without a kit lens to speak of, that's pretty entry level in terms of specifications, hobbled video - it's outselling all new entrants into the full frame mirrorless landscape. Something that must annoy Panasonic and Nikon to no end.

As BCN noted, expanding the lens lineup is of paramount importance to Canon, and by this time next year they could have announced or released up to 18 lenses in little over 20 months since the start of the EOS RF mount - which is impressive production even by Canon's standards.

While I think the trending is important for this sales statistics, one month at a time, is just too short of timelines when we are talking about such small quantities, and also small segments of the market.  Also the mirrorless full frame market is simply a segement of the full frame market as a whole, it would be interesting to see this plotted out over time for full frame in general, which would go a long way of seeing just what kind of disruption switching over to the RF and Z mount has caused.  BCN? How about it?