Saturday 9 February 2013

Will Fujifilm turn the wheel of fortune in 2013?


Fujifilm makes nice cameras but its imaging group is in red for some time, ironically because of digital cameras (link to Thom Hogan's post)

It is hard to make money on compact cameras now: the sales and the prices are down. Fuji betted on advanced X models but the company was hit by sticky blades on X100 and white orbs in X10 (the latter issue was hugely overblown IMHO by energetic enthusiasts). In both cases the company fixed the problems at no cost to the users. The Fuji X-Pro1 was expensive when first released, so the sales probably were not very high in numbers. The X-E1 was released at the end of 2012 and its sales would have small impact on the financial results in 2012. But now the company got very popular model without any obvious issue plus several lenses including recently released 14mm f/2.8. Release of X-E1 is boosted sales of primes such as an excellent 35mm f/1.4 (see interview with Fuji rep).

On top of this, sales of new cameras with fast hybrid autofocus, X100S and X20, is about to start. The release of second zoom lens is planned for the first half of the year, and I suspect the updated models (either X-Pro2 or X-E2) with new autofocus and updated viewfinder will follow shortly. However, on mirrorless cameras the autofocus speed depends both on camera and lens, so it is hard to predict what  improvement in autofocus speed on new bodies will be achieved with available lenses, especially primes.

Anyway, the company has:
1) popular mirrorless model with several good lenses
2) updated version of very popular "big sensor" compact with improved autofocus that should be bugs-free
3) updated version of compact camera with fast autofocus and increased resolution, with unique lens and viewfinder.

Would it be enough to make the imaging group profitable? While Fujifilm can sustain the losses in imaging department for some time the situation cannot last forever.  

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