87% drop in digital camera sales in the last 10 years

Canon is preparing for the time when the digital camera market will reach annual sales of only 10 million units; That’s about 8.2 percent of sales in 2010. With this in mind, Canon is reducing camera production and preparing to reduce product sales.

According to Petapixel , Toyo Keizai has published important articles focusing on the digital camera industry in recent days, which contain valuable information. The media recently interviewed Takeshi Tokura , CEO of Canon Visual Communications, and Minoru Tanaka , Canon’s Vice President. Tokura told Toyo Keizai months ago that the only reason for the Canon EOS R5 ‘s 8K capability was that Canon wanted to directly target its competitors in the 8K range. 

Tanaka says he and Canon executives have held several meetings to better understand the current state of the camera industry. According to him, Canon is preparing for the days when the total number of digital cameras sold in a one-year period will fall below 10 million units. Ten years ago, the digital camera market recorded annual sales of 121.5 million units, and most of these cameras had built-in lenses. In recent years, due to the noticeable advancement of smartphone cameras, the popularity of fixed lens cameras has become very low. According to statistics, in 2019, only 15.2 million units of this type of camera were “sold” worldwide.

Looking at the chart above provided by Statista.com, we see that for the first time in 2018, the sale of a camera with a replaceable lens went beyond a camera with a fixed lens, and apparently this trend continues.

Another point is that the number of cameras with interchangeable lenses has decreased slightly; But the demand for them over the past decade seems to have been largely stable. It is almost clear that predicting a downward trend in demand for fixed-lens cameras makes Tanaka’s claim that less than 10 million units of this type of camera will be sold annually in the near future to be much more realistic. 

Tanaka points to a policy to accelerate the downsizing of Canon’s fixed-lens camera business, and says Canon intends to speed up the business development process, camera production, sales systems, and the like to better meet annual sales of less than 10 million units. gets ready.

Most likely, Canon intends to focus on the areas that have shown the most flexibility in relation to different situations; That is, the camera industry with a replaceable lens. Canon is doing more research to expand its film business.

Of course, this does not mean that Canon does not want to test itself in the market by producing unusual cameras. Tokura, for example, mentioned the production of cameras that “do not look like Canon products” and include things like the PowerShot ZOOM  , which was released in the last month of 2020. He also mentioned the launch of the iNSPiC REC wearable camera in 2019, and said that the iNSPiC REC is a low-cost solution that could be present in the market alongside smartphones. Canon is well aware that just as it is developing a camera with a replaceable lens such as the R5, it must pay attention to concept models designed for specific purposes.