You've probably seen the following pie chart on a photography Web site lately:
This is a graph of total camera sales (not just mirrorless) using the just published annual Nikkei total sales report. 2024 was a growth year for camera sales (14% increase in shipments). The question I had on seeing Nikkei's article was this: in a growth year, who was growing and who was shrinking?
That turned out to be an interesting question. So here goes, in order of best to worst performance from 2023 to 2024:
- Fujifilm — grew 72.1%
- Nikon — grew 18.5%
- Ricoh — grew 16.7%
- Sony — grew 16.5%
- Average — 14% growth
- Median — 9.8% growth
- Panasonic — grew 7.7%
- Canon — grew 5.7%
- OMDS — shrunk 11.1%
So, four companies are quite happy with that result, three not so much.
I haven't seen the "mirrorless only" numbers from Nikkei yet, and that's likely going to reveal something different, as Nikon really doesn't play in compacts anymore and Ricoh is mostly selling compacts.
Overall, the four top companies—Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony—now account for 93.7% of the unit volume, up from 92.9%. If you want to restrict that just the top three, the number is 84.5% of shipments. In essence, we have an oligopoly in terms of cameras (at least as defined by Nikkei; this doesn't count products like GoPro, Osmo, etc.).
