Canon lagging in mirrorless sales

According to an article on Toyokeizai, Canon is lagging behind Sony in mirrorless.

In other words, the sky is blue and grass is usually green.

According to them and their private research, the market share is;

• Sony 42.5%
• Canon 19.8%
• Fujifilm 17.5%
• Olympus 8.4%
• Panasonic 7.0%
• Nikon 4.6%

Keep in mind that Canon also has well over 50% of the DSLR market on top of this - which isn't mentioned.  Also this is for 2018 mirrorless marketshare when the RF and Z mount new systems were only shipping for around 2 months.

Both Canon and Nikon are navigating a tight turn, it's going to be painful, and it's surprising how many credible sources that comment on this, can't simply see that Nikon and Canon simply have taken the entire camera market and tossed a hand grenade into the works.  It's going to take a while to flesh out the ecosystems for both Canon and Nikon, and it's going to take a while before they can offer credible reasons for users to switch from the EF mount and the F mount. (which is still shipping over 60% of all ILC's in the market today).

What's not happening though, is that another website, claims that a Canon manager states; "We have no choice but to change the management plan."

However it was NOT a Canon manager, it was a third-party parts supplier that assumed that Canon would sell more.  Such a subtle difference. 

Here's the actual full quotation;

An executive of a parts manufacturer that supplies Canon's mirrorless camera parts said, “We thought that sales would increase with the introduction of full-size mirrorless, but it was at a level that did not reach the initial plan at all. "We have no choice but to change the management plan."

Is Canon in trouble?

Not really.  I think they knew this would be painful  - they do have experience in doing a wholesale mount switch as they did from FD to EF.  So they have some idea on how to navigate that turn.  The problem is, that the FD to EF provided extremely compelling reasons to switch mounts.  The EF to RF (and the same for the Nikon F to Z mounts) are less compelling.  Especially when F and EF mount lenses and camera bodies are just so good.

Richard CanonNewsRichard CanonNews

Richard has been using Canon cameras since the 1990s, with his first being the now legendary EOS-3. Since then, Richard has continued to use Canon cameras and now focuses mostly on infrared photography. Richard is the founder and editor of CanonNews since 2017, and has worked as a writer on CanonRumors and other websites in the past.

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