It seems that every few months we have to go over this: a new camera making it to the #1 spot in the best selling mirrorless camera list right after being announced indicates... absolutely nothing. It just means that Amazon sold more Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II cameras than Sony a6000 cameras for a day or two. This usually happens because the new Olympus was just opened for pre-order. Pretty much every new camera that was announced in the past 10 years made it to the #1 spot on Amazon for a few days. As you can see from the picture above, the new Olympus is no longer on the #1 spot.
Update - see also this post on the same topic:
Debunking fake news again: Amazon’s sales rankings don’t mean anything
In the overall interchangeable lens cameras, Canon has been pretty much dominating the best-selling list for a very long time (Nikon is usually second) and in the general camera category, Fuji Instax has been on the top spot for a while. Those are the facts, everything else is false, misleading reporting.
More stats
Here for example are the latest BCN sales rankings from Japan for the third week of October (BCN collects sales data from approximately 2/3 of all Japanese retail stores):
CIPA also published their latest data (up to September) for camera and lens shipments (orange: 2016, black: 2015, blue: 2014 click for larger view) - because of Photokina, September was almost as good as September last year (click for larger view):
Financial results
Several companies also reported their financial results in the past few weeks (updated with the latest financial results):
- Canon recently released their Q3 financial results and their Q3 operating profit nearly halves.
- Tamron's Q3 financial results can be found here and they are also not very good.
- Olympus also reported a double-digit drop in camera sales.
- From Nikkei: Ricoh has announced the closure of a production facility as well as plans to streamline back-office operations. Canon has downgraded its full-year forecast, now expecting a 25% drop in group net profit for 2016 amid declining sales of office printers and cameras.
- Nikon also dropped sales forecast (Reuters)
- Sony also released their Q2 report - as you can imagine their semiconductor business is doing pretty good, while the company's profit were below estimates (could not find data for their camera unit):
What I am trying to say is this: in today's market, I don't think one company is doing better than another company. The whole photo industry is in decline and anyone trying to say otherwise is simply trolling.
