Canon Fiscal Year End for 2017: Strong corporate gains

Strong Year on Year Growth for Canon Inc.

Canon, the first company of the camera sector reported in it’s year end at 15:00 Japan time January 30th.  The results for the company were extremely positive with new business units bumping up Canon’s overall sales nearly 20% and their operating profit by a significant 44.8% to 3 billion USD.

Canon Imaging

In Imaging, where we particularly have a greater importance, Canon posted a year on year increase of 3.7% increase of sales in a declining market, and an increase of 22% of operating profit to 1.6 billion USD.

It’s difficult to estimate how much ILC sales will end up being for the year as CIPA is still a few days away from reporting December shipment values.
Canon has declared them to be around 11.4 million units for the year were sold, this usually matches up with around a maximum of a 5% variance to CIPA data.  We estimate that CIPA will show around 11.5 to 11.6 million shipped units this last year.  Why the difference? Not all cameras shipped are sold, some are used for internal use, some are used for camera warranty returns, etc.

For the year on year ILC unit sales Canon reported a slight downturn from last year. However, to be fair to Canon, they have been predicting this since the start of the year.  They have moved back to closer to their more traditional market share of around 45% of the entire ILC market from the high of 48.8% last year, however still sitting at an impressive estimated 47.9%.

For the last three years Canon has basically shipped and sold the same number of camera units, even though the overall market has gone from 13.05 million units shipped to somewhere around 11.4 million.

Canon’s comments on their ILC performance;

Canon took steps to stimulate demand through new products, launching 6 models in 2017, the most in the industry. All of these new products were well received by the market, receiving high markets for their enhanced network connectivity and AF capabilities for which there is strong user demand. Among these, we grew sales of the 6D Mark II – a model that features a full-size sensor in a body that is relatively compact and light and offers improvements in basic functions, which contributed to the shift to hi-amateurs. Launching such new products, enables us to limit the decline in selling prices and as a result, we improved sales and profitability compared with last year. 

A remarkable achievement in a declining market, where pundits in various forums have all but written Canon off as the next “Kodak”.

The point and shoot market had a renaissance this year with a strong year on year increase over last year, however part of this could be the earthquake effect on overly dampening last year’s numbers.   As of this writing, we have November’s data, which shows a 11% year on year increase.  It should be noted that Canon still calls this market declining for the year as they report that the market has slipped 10% to 13.5 million units.  They of course have more data than we do right now. 

If this holds up the performance of the point and shoot group was staggeringly good, posting a 4.04 million unit sales effectively the same as last year, in a market that declined 10%.  

Canon’s comments on the point and shoot market;

As for digital compact cameras, amid the shrinking market, unit sales remained at the same level as the previous year, supported by the increased sales of such high-value-added models as the newly launched G9 X Mark II—part of the high-image-quality PowerShot G-series lineup.

Over the next few days we will update this report as CIPA data for the year is finalized.