Canon: Digital camera market hits rock bottom in two years

Fujio Mitarai, CEO of Japanese camera maker Canon, says the digital camera market will halve in the next two years and will then bottom out. Ultimately, only advanced amateurs and professionals will buy cameras.

The Canon CEO said in an interview with the Japanese business newspaper Nikkei that the sales volume of Canon cameras has fallen by about ten percent every year in recent years. According to Fujio Mitarai, the global market for interchangeable-lens cameras is currently around 10 million units. The segment of mirrorless cameras is growing, according to the CEO, but that is because photographers exchange their SLR; it would not be a growth of the market as a whole.

Mitarai expects the decline to continue for two years before reaching the bottom. At that point, the digital camera market would be five or six million units a year. These are then almost all bought by advanced amateurs and professional photographers. The decline in the camera market has been going on for years due to the rise of smartphones. The segment of digital compact cameras has almost completely disappeared.

Canon will increasingly focus on business applications, says the CEO. While the consumer camera market is declining, other markets, such as those for industrial applications and security, continue to grow.