Canon releases Financial results for the 2nd Quarter 2021

Canon today posted their 2nd quarter financials and the results were encouraging overall for the company with sales and profits rebounding from 2020's COVID-related struggles. As a result, Canon is increasing its financial projections for the remainder of the year - but not by much. As they note, they are still a little concerned with the rise in cases in some parts of the world, as COVID continues to sweep through hotspots in the world.

For imaging, they are increasing their sales projections from 617 billion yen to 661 billion yen. and projecting a dramatic increase in profit from 31 billion to 71 billion (essentially the margin increasing from 5% to 10%)

Canon expects the total camera market to be around 6 million units this year with Canon neatly taking 50% of that market with 3 million unit sales.

Canon stated in their summary;

Demand for cameras is growing steadily thanks to the strength of consumer spending in the United States and elsewhere, and the increasing number of people picking up cameras as a hobby and image expression as a new way of using time amid the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, we raised our outlook for the size of the global camera market by 200 thousand units and now expect the overall size to be 6 million units for the full year.

In the second quarter, the share of total sales attributable to the EOS R5 and EOS R6, for which sales remain strong, has increased more than expected.

In addition to this, the number of full-frame mirrorless camera users who purchase RF lenses has been accelerating since the launch of the R5 and R6, creating a situation where we cannot supply some products in a timely manner.

Buried a little deeper in their summary, Canon expects digital compact cameras to continue to fall, with sales going from 1.48 million units last year to around 1.25 million this year. But with no new models (and none really even rumored) I'm not sure this is much of a surprise, as compacts, EF, and EOS-M are all notably missing from Canon's writeups and have been for more than a few quarters. As it should - Canon has a mount install base in the 10's of millions if not more with the EF mount, once the RF mount picks up enough momentum, that's a huge market that Canon is looking at moving over to the RF mount.

You can read through the financials here.