Biz 101, Competition, Customers, Marketing, Pricing, Quotes, Rants, Scams

How Canon did in 2012

Please note that I'm only highlighting Canon's Imaging division which represents 40% of the company.

  • As with all multi-national companies, the financial information changes according to the currencies. Canon, like Nikon and most other Japanese camera companies, keep their “official accounting books” in Japanese Yens. They also provide US Dollars conversion (which I will use). The unknown is how is the exchange rate calculated? Is it on a transaction basis, on a daily basis, on a weekly or monthly basis?
  • Usually, the exchange rates are averaged over the month but they can use any other method, like the last day of the month as long as they always use the same method.
  • They do not have to explain the details of how they calculate the exchange rates, they just have to state which exchange rate they used.

Demand for interchangeable-lens digital cameras continued to display strong growth across global markets while demand for compact digital cameras shrunk not only in developed countries, but also in China and some emerging nations.

Source: Canon financials for the year 2012

and

Universal Truths and the Consequences

Photography is about images

To make photos you need to have a camera. even when people will wear Google glasses, we will still need some type/form of cameras. Without a camera, you can't make a photo. From the pinhole camera to latest and the greatest Leica M or the Hasselblad H5D, you need some type of camera.

Nobody except professional photographers and a few “crazy photographers” carry their dSLRs with them. A few people have their point and shoot camera with them but almost everybody carries a cell phone with them.

Do Your Photos Have Any Value?

Photos can have 3 values:

  1. Sentimental
  2. Financial
  3. Historical
  • The vast majority of the photos only have a sentimental value. These are the photos the people take with them in case of floods, fire, disasters… When was the last time you looked at them? Do you even know where they are? Can you find them? In the old days, only 15 years ago, we would look through the albums and go through the shoe boxes full of photos. Today? I know where my photos are in Lightroom. I know my categories, I know my keywords, I know which directory/folder these photos are located in.

The State of the Photography Industry 2013

I was at a presentation in preparation for CES 2013. (What do they need to prepare?) It was a panel of men in the imaging distribution industry. We are talking the distributors, not the individual retailers nor the photographers. We are talking the big boys, the guys with the dollars. And yes, it's the guys, there were all men. They spoke percentages, they never mentioned units or dollars. I wrote down a few numbers. To confuse the matters a little more, the various distributors spoke “differently”. Some of the numbers are for the whole 2012 year, some of the numbers are for the first 9 month of the year 2012.

My comments are in the footnotes.

Canon Sells More dSLRs

Over the Xmas - New Year break many websites and business news reported that Canon sold more dSLRs than anyone else in 2012. The pundits gave the following numbers:

  Canon:    28.6%       
  Nikon:    25.0%       
  Olympus:  14.3%       
  Sony:     13.3%       
  Panasonic:11.3%

We know that the Olympus-Panasonic alliance is about the micro4/3. This makes the micro4/3 represent 25% of the market. 99.9999% of Sony is APS-C, over 85% of Nikon's dSLR sales are the APS-C and Canon is slightly less than 85% sales are APS-C dSLR.

Camera of the Year: 2012 Edition

2013 is here and we had all the possible announcements from every possible manufacturer. Now is a time for me to award the title of the camera of the year, the 2012 edition.

Nikon is on a roll when it comes to full frame cameras with the D800 (the monster), the D4 (the speedy Gonzales) and the D600 (for the rest of us). Accoring to a local dealer that sells both Canon and Nikon, the sales of the D800 are “very disappointing.” The Canon 5DMk3 outsells the D800 by 2 to 1. He was expecting a lot more sales since the D800 has no competition in the resolution department.

My 2012 Predictions

My predictions for 2012 are not a typo. I have been doing this since 2008 because I do not like being wrong and I procrastinate a lot. By the time I'm ready to write my predictions, it's well passed the spring, so I just have to procrastinate a few more months.

  • We survived! The most important is that we survived the end of world. Think about the alternative, what a bummer that would have been.
  • 2012 has been a very good year for the photo industry. It came following 2011 and before that 2010 (“duh!”).

Answer the "Bloody" Phone

In the last month, I've contacted 3 professional photographers. I have emailed all of them and I have left voice mails with two of them. Three weeks later, nothing. Either they have not replied to my emails. One said, “I am very busy right now but I will email you back in a couple of days.” The second photographer sent me an automated reply. “I very busy right now, email or call me back in 48 hours.” The last one never answered his phone or his email. How do they stay in business? How do they earn a living?

This is work, this is business. Many photographers complain about how people do not value photos anymore. Then they complain that there is no money in photography, that every Tom, Dick and Harry poses as a professional photographer…

When was the last time that you hired somebody that couldn't be bothered returning your calls, replying to your emails… You do not answer, next … There is always somebody else available…

If you run a business, this is a business. Businesses have:

Photography: The Latest Killer App

Facebook is the biggest photo gallery, by far. Nobody even comes close. Mark Zuckerberg understands that photography is the latest “killer app.” He just has to look at the numbers, 350+ million photos uploaded to Facebook every day and 150+ billion photos hosted on Facebook. In April 2012, Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook purchased Instagram for a billion dollars, and the acquisition (legal…) was finalized in September 2012. Now Instagram has announced new terms of service starting 16-Jan-2013:

2013 and Your Copyrights

2013 is only 2½ weeks away, if we make it pass the Mayan end of the world on 21-Dec-2012 aka 21/12/12 or 12/12/21. As a photographers, I have a list to prepare for the new 2013 year. One of the item on my list is to update my copyrights. My problems is that I need to change the copyright ©2012 to ©2013 in too many places:

  • My website in the footers
  • My cameras
  • My various software
  • My contracts

What used to take 15 minutes now is almost a full hour.

1.

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