Today you will find a lot of fake news and made up rumors reported on some websites. Of course, the information is always carefully crafted so you cannot really verify the validity at a later time. The only purpose of those “rumors” is clickbait and I usually don’t report them here, but I saw a post from Thom Hogan today where he debunks the latest claim (reported as “a rumor I trust“): “Internal Fujifilm document predicts 50% market share decrease for Canon and Nikon within 2021″.
Here are a few quotes from Thom Hogan’s latest article titled “The Rumored Claims Are Wrong” (read the full post for a more detailed analysis):
The big one this year is the totally unverified rumor that an internal Fujifilm memo says by “2021 Fujifilm predicts a decrease in market share for Canon and Nikon of 50%.” I haven’t added it to my Claims to Remember list because it isn’t a verifiable claim. It’s hearsay on a rumor site with a vested interest in Fujifilm’s success.
Canon and Nikon currently have 95% of 7.5m units (DSLRs). Fujifilm, Canon, Olympus, Panasonic, and Sony have about the same 95% of 3.9m units (mirrorless). Canon specifically claims in their audited financial information that they’re at 48% of all ILC and should reach 50% this calendar year. That’s 5.5m of the 11m units, DSLR and mirrorless.
So, for Fujifilm’s rumored claim to be true, Canon would have to hit 25% ILC sales, or 2.75m units. That alone would require them to lose DSLR market share to Nikon in the next three years! It would also assume that Canon had no significant mirrorless market share. Neither of those things seem at all likely. It also ignores what surveys of current Canon and Nikon owners show: many of those owning Canikon products are waiting for those two companies to produce more significant mirrorless models.
As far as anyone can tell, the current situation is this: Canon 50%, Nikon 22%, Sony 14%. That’s 86% of all the DSLR/mirrorless units that are being produced, of which Canikon is 72%. The purported internal memo is said to claim that Canikon would therefore be at 36% in three sale years. That’s a change from almost 8m units to 3.5m units in three years (using the current CIPA numbers and those 15% decline/20% increase estimates I noted above). I find that unfathomable.
