Canon Sales Continue to Plummet

Paul F said:
In that financial report, they list imaging and sensing as a single unit, but on page 21, they break out sensor operating income and show it to have gone up rather than down as I reported (on a quarterly and yearly basis). I can't find the report I read to compare...
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Sony's sensor division is doing so well, some large investors called for a spin off. Sony, mindful of the abject failures of "Joanie loves Chachi" and "Hello, Larry", refused.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Daniel-Loeb-calls-on-Sony-to-spin-off-sensor-business

Panasonic released their financials too but they dumped cameras and TV's into the "appliance" section, citing lower sales but providing no further details. They expect the appliance sales to rebound with a new 8K dishwasher /countertop broiler combo.
 
https://www.43rumors.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Bildschirmfoto-2020-02-07-um-07.50.59.png

(43Rumors made a PNG, so might as well let the site have the credit)

Olympus is in deep doo-doo. They're losing tons of money in the photo-video sector but keep it as an ongoing concern nonetheless. If they're not a zombie yet, they will be soon.

PS. Ran across a short Jalopnik news update about Jaguar taking a series of breaks from production. I see some parallels to the photo-video industry. One can get what was only recently a luxury car performance from the mid-priced vehicles, with the weakest brands folding first. A friend's friend (an attorney in her 60's) has a 5-series BMW but the lease is up. My buddy says to her, "Why do you need to spend $70,000 on another 5-series when a fully equipped Camry, Genesis or Accord will do the same job for $30,000 less?".
 
James0b57 said:
... Are sales really dropping that much, or was there just huge expansion through the 90’s and 2000’s?
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The Japanese are known for long term/lifelong employment ... and zombie companies. The expansion in photo-video took place in the oughties and, with the sales off by 85% from its top in 2012, the logistical tail end expenses, aka corporate, R&D, operational staff, seems insurmountable. They could shuffle the costs from division to division due to the overlap (Hollywood accounting, as it were) but undergoing massive layoffs is an anathema to the corporate legacy.

An example -

Mizuho is planning to get rid of 19,000 posts out of a total global workforce of 79,000 by the end of March 2027, while shuttering 100 of its 500 domestic branches by March 2025, according to the company's latest earnings presentation. Rather than hitting the headcount target through layoffs, the bank expects to, for example, scrap any posts vacated by retiring employees and reduce its graduate recruitment schemes.
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https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/phrn2tmys8dwp80pxxvtsq2
 
The Japanese way is that the company makes it known that they want workers to leave, so workers start looking for jobs elsewhere, and whoever can get one leaves the company. At least I read it was like that years ago, no idea if it has changed (younger generations are not playing by their parents' rules).
 
CIPA released February (pre-Covid in most places) sales numbers. The ILC totals are down about 27% from last year and 50% from 2018. One has to figure that, outside of the Sony chip business, every manufacturer is going to be in the red.

The smartphone business was expecting a slight rebound off 2019 due to 5G and the new Qualcomm chip (and, I say, new camera modules) but that's not going to happen now either. The global smartphone shipments were expected to hit 1.3 billion before Europe and parts of the US went on the quarantine. Once the world returns to some sort of normalcy by the end of summer, the new Samsung, Huawei, OPPO and Xiaomi models will match and sometimes exceed the camera specs below the enthusiast and pro tiers. To quote Larry David, this is "prognosis negative".
 
They either hadn't done the Samsung 20 Ultra yet or are waiting for the promised firmware updates. The Ultra had auto focus issues and the March update didn't do much to solve the problem. So, Samsung went back to work. DxO did review the audio portion.

Anyhow, DxO rates P40 at 140 on photo (compared to 124 for the iPhone 11 Pro Max). What's more relevant is that, presuming consistency in the evaluation process, a year old iPhone X was 101, 2018 8 Plus 96 and 2017 7+ was 90, thus making P40 more than 50% "better" than a three year old Apple model. Meanwhile, a 2014 Nikon 810 has virtually identical scores to all the current full frame cameras. It's rated as 97, whereas Z7 is 99, D850 is 100, as is Sony A7RIII (gee, I wonder why).

And a long article on the topic.

https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones-vs-cameras-closing-the-gap-on-image-quality/
 
I'm not sure what those scores mean and how an increase translates into actual performance that people can notice in their pictures. But I see very good dynamic range, very good AI bokeh, and very good detail in all conditions (good light, low light, portrait lens), coupled with automatic processing that is better than what most people would do to their stills from a $1500 camera.
 
Samuel H said:
I'm not sure what those scores mean and how an increase translates into actual performance that people can notice in their pictures. But I see very good dynamic range, very good AI bokeh, and very good detail in all conditions (good light, low light, portrait lens), coupled with automatic processing that is better than what most people would do to their stills from a $1500 camera.
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Well, that's basically it. I wish they shot some charts, texts and some standard layouts under the controlled interior conditions and lighting before going outside. Nonetheless, resolution is up, low light performance is up, color accuracy is up, auto focus is near perfect, zoom works and the price is reasonable.

Now, in the comment section, there's some dissent about DxO's instant enchantment with Huawei products. This can be particular to the reviewer or the company. I know from seeing the US based smartphone reviewers, there's a greater tendency to worship Apple and dismiss Samsung, with Huawei being a smartphona non grata. Likewise, due to generally low grades given to Canon cameras and sensors, DxO is despised on Canon forums as much as anyone not named William Conrad. And most gear reviewers generally avoid negative summaries, lest they want to risk not being invited for the next trip to Maui, Miami or Milan for the next unveiling of the greatest model in the history of modeling.

And that's how it goes. Reminds of the 1980's CD player reviews, when any difference within a price range was too minute to make reading the review worthwhile.

PS. I watched a review of (Hyundai) Genesis G90 yesterday, with the very popular host livid about it not having a rear seat massager. Courses for (375) horses.
 
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And who would have ever thought you’d be talking about Hyundai and rear seat massager in the same sentence and it not really be about the back seat full of cockroaches. My how things change in 20 years.
 
This news made both the financial publications, as well as the photo-video related sites. Unfortunately, there was a heavy infusion of politics, so I'll provide the basic summary - in a Covid based stimulus package in Japan, $2 Billion are earmarked for shifting the production out of China and (back) into Japan. There's additional $200M for companies to shift production out of China (but, technically, not into Japan). Nikon's began moving (additional?) manufacturing into its plan in Thailand. (Olympus moved its production out of China and into Vietnam last year).
 
This whole situation makes me wonder when the R5 will be released. It was sort of talked about for this summer but I would not be surprised if it will be pushed who knows forward.
 
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