CIPA September 2017 Results

CIPA September 2017 results promised to show us a little more about if the trending the shipments has indeed leveled off and that signs that the industry as a whole has stabilized has indeed occurred.

The prior three months of data was circumspect because everyone sans Canon had sensor shortages due to the earthquake in Kumamoto Japan.

From the overall data, we see that indeed, there was an increase in monthly shipments from a year prior, starting to give us hope that the worst of the bottoming has already occurred.

Mirrorless in Asia continues to increase the overall shipments of Mirrorless against DSLR's, as it looks like somewhere around 34% is the new normal this year for the overall global marketshare.

If we look at Asia MILC in particular, we see that it continues to hover around 60% of the units shipped, with NA, Europe splitting the remaining 40% in between them.

For Europe, the last 3 years it's global share of both DSLR's and Mirrorless are pretty close to equal with a slight advantage to DSLR's.  Overall, mirrorless is closing the gap, and it would not surprise us to see this trending to continue as Mirrorless gains momentum in Europe.  Just to explain this graph a bit more, the Global % is the number of units shipped to Europe as a % of the global units shipped.   This tries to determine the "importance" of the market against the global market.

The Americas are a little interesting as a higher percentage of DSLR shipments seem to be occurring to the Americas, while the overall Mirrorless global percentage has remained pretty constant.  This of course makes the overall marketshare for mirrorless and DSLR to be much flatter than what we are seeing for Europe.

If we look at the combined Europe and Americas marketshare for DSLR's versus mirrorless we have a very slight trending downwards in DSLR marketshare, but it's remarkably stable over the past 4+ years.

Much as been made over the years over the value.  I have seen some people suggest that all Canon sells is "cheap cameras" to make up the vast majority of it's marketshare, while other vendors sell "only expensive cameras".

Quite a neat theory, so now we'll take a quick look at values of Mirrorless and DSLR's.

Mirrorless has a spike this year in the Americas most likely when the Sony A9 started shipping, however the main takeaway is that the Americas get the more expensive mirrorless and the rest of the world is pretty much the same as it has been for the past 1.5 years.

We don't see this trending as much on DSLR's as the values are more intermixed and no obvious trends.  The takeway is that in the Americas, a higher percentage of shipment value is associated with Mirrorless and that trend is increasing as more high valued mirrorless ships to the Americas.

When we compare the two against each other, we find that overall, the value of cameras are the same, whether they be mirrorless or DSLR. However, rather depressingly, we see the average value trending upwards as cameras get more and more expensive to purchase.

There is certainly reason for optimism in these results, and we are certainly seeing mirrorless trending upwards this year.  It's no real surprise that both Canon and Nikon are rumored to be getting into the more high valued Mirrorless as there is certainly a strong trend in the Americas that this is a good proposition. It remains to be seen if either company can be competitive to the huge time advantage that Sony has built up in this market.

All the graphs in this article are from the monthly CIPA data results transposed to Microsoft Excel for analysis.