BCN: Sony maintains it's hold on the full frame mirrorless market in Japan

Just ahead of BCN's awards, BCN released a  blog where BCN explains that over the holiday season, Sony overall managed just under a 70% marketshare of full frame mirrorless.  As they say in machine translated Japanese;

Sony had about 100% share until about July. After October, when two companies entered the market, the market share was dropped to the level of less than 70%, but in November and December the level of just under 70% was maintained. As a result, Nikon and Canon ended the year-end shopping bout with a big difference. There is plenty of lineup of body and lenses, and the price is won.

This stands to reason really for a few reasons;

• Both Canon and Nikon have incomplete systems with very few native lenses, and hardly any third party native lenses yet for their respective mounts.  Sony has well over 20 native lenses, and a vast array of third party lens support for the FE mount.   It's going to take years for Canon and Nikon to catch up in this regard.
• Canon and Nikon are trying to convince their large F and EF user bases to buy into the RF and Z mount respectively.  Meanwhile, the EF and F mount full frame cameras continue to be manufactured and sold.  Cameras such as the 6D and the D750 were on significant sales over the holiday season, dampening people purchasing Canon or Nikon's mirrorless options.
• Both Canon and Nikon systems are months old, they didn't go on sale during the holiday season, meanwhile, the Sony systems were on sale throughout the holiday season.

Sony is ahead of the curve, and it will take time before Canon and Nikon have supplanted Sony in this market.  Also, keep in mind this is still a niche market overall in the grand scheme of things, as APS-C still dominates the overall camera market, not to mention Canon and Nikon's EF and F mount full frame cameras.  I wish that BCN reported this data for full frame cameras overall and we could see the effect of the new mounts have on Canon and Nikon's overall full frame sales.  Personally, I think that is more relevant than simply looking at mirrorless.

How did Canon themselves do? Well, they fell off a bit from their high in October, and slipped down to a virtual tie with Nikon in December, leading slightly with 17.5% versus 16.0% for Nikon in December.  The EOS R remains the second best selling mirrorless full frame camera in Japan behind the very dominant winner, the A7 III from Sony.

BCN for those unaware reports on POS data from around 50% of all Japan stores.  They have very credible data about the market in Japan.