CIPA: YoY ILC Market Correction continues, and Mirrorless continues to have a great year

Today CIPA released it's October data, and we once again drilled deep into the numbers to try to make some sense out of them. October is traditionally when we see the highest spike in shipments as companies get ready for Black Friday and American Thanksgiving sales.  That really didn't happen this year as Month to Month shipments remained fairly flat.

What was numerically curious was that 78% of the YoY amount of DSLR's were shipped in October, whereas 112% of Mirrorless were shipped (67% and 90% respectively to the Americas).  This may indicate that the DSLR's are having a hard time selling, and that there is inventory built up in the supply chains moreso for DSLR's than for mirrorless.

It also may account for some of the deep discounting on DSLR's especially Canon that we saw during black friday sales.

The rise of mirrorless continues this year with an increased in shipments over the same period last year.  However, even with that, the trend is that the market correction that occurred the last 3 months of last year were simply because of production coming back online due to the earthquake.Don't be too surprised, or shocked even if this continues for the next two CIPA reporting periods, to appear something like this.

This projection is simply based upon what usually occurs historically to the market in November and December.  Even with that projection, it still shows that the level of units shipped from 2016 to 2017 were almost flat, showing that the ILC market as a whole has more or less stablized.  This is a good thing ;)

Mirrorless continues it's onslaught on the market posting significant gains this year.  Most of the shipments are still occuring to Asia markets, which still hold around a 50-60% marketshare of all Mirrorless shipped.   What is interesting, is that Japan is coming less dominant in the Asia markets as other markets coninue to exonerably increase their market dominance over Japan.

You can see in the above graph for Asian MILC marketshare that slowly the trendline is that Asia (all countries sans Japan) has a slow but steady increase since almost the beginning of cipa reporting on Mirrorless in 2012, and the gap (the Japan marketshare) gets smaller and smaller.

It should be mentioned that Japan holds a significant MILC marketsway given it's population of only around 127 million.  Per capita, no where else comes close to Japan.

Overall, we see Mirrorless continue to hold a 30+% marketshare of the ILC market, up fairly dramatically from year's past.

One thing to note, while this year has been great for mirrorless, extrapolating any long term trend from this is pretty impossible.  The market had a correction in 2013 and the trend didn't continue from that point in 2013 for nearly 2+ years.  What we may be seeing is a more of a swing back and forth as major mirrorless products get announced and shipped, and vis versa for DLSR's.

In other words, predictions of doom for DSLR's are still a ways away.

What I find most shocking and interesting is what is happening in Americas (also a little in Europe, but we'll focus this time in the Americas) this year.  If there was ever a case for Canon and Nikon to get into mirrorless in more of a big way, it's what's happening in the Americas more than Asia.

The next bit of stats are going to deal with the nebulous statistic called in CIPA .. value.

I don't normally talk that much about value for a few reasons which I'm going to get out right now before the mirrorless fanboys have me for dinner;

• It's an arbitrary value reported by each company.
• It's based upon the FOB price, which the ratio between FOB price and on the shelf price to you the consumer can be different for each company; depending on thier global infrastructure
• It's in Yen and doesn't take into account year to year (or even month to month) shifts in currency.  While products manufacturered solely in Japan will have in theory less of a shift, products manaufacturered mostly in other asian countries (or associated supply chain) may have the FOB price change as the cost of manufacturing changes. 
• Also over time, the FOB price of a camera may change in it's lifecycle.

Units is a hard cold number.  it can't be swayed and manipulated that much. Value on the otherhand is difficult it not impossible to measure year on year with any sort of accuracy.  Simply being; there's way too many variables that one simply can't take into account because we don't know them all.

Now back to Americas.

What we are seeing is that there's more of an increased value versus units for each of these two regions in the last year.  Moreso with the Americas which should come as no surprise because in September's CIPA notes we talked about the per unit values that were shipping into the Americas and how they spiked up for Americas and Mirrorless.

In a way, this should be no great surprise; as the mirrorless companies most notably Sony, Fuji Panasonic and Olympus have for most purposes seen dramatic increases in their per unit price over the past couple of years.

This chart compares the DSLR marketshare both with value and also with units.  It's amazing on how consistent these were until the last two years in NA.  Arguably when mirrorless companies started to increase the price per unit.  As you can see in the americas there's more FOB value marketshare shipped to the americas for mirrorless than there is units as a ration during this year specifically.  In other words, a higher percentage of value versus number of units.  This speaks well for why all of a sudden we hear of both Canon and Nikon entering the high end mirrorless market in 2018.

Overall I would expect mirrorless to continue to hold a 30-35% of the market until the end of the year and Canon's prediction of nearly the same units sold this year as last year to hold true.  Too much was made of the rise of shipments over the summer and we'll most likely continue to see a correction year on year in November and December.

As with all these reports, this data was collected from CIPA's monthly reports and entered into what seems to be one extremely massive Excel spreadsheet and crunched.

See you all next month ;)