CIPA April: A great month of milestones

This months’ CIPA reports shows some pretty good first milestones for the industry that are worth drilling into.

For the first month ever, the value of mirrorless and DSLR shipments has reached a parity.  This is most likely due to the launch of Sony’s A7III, a mirrorless camera with mass appeal.

First, reporting on value isn’t nearly as accurate as reporting on unit, because there is too much variation in between the value reported here (FOB) versus the value that is on the store shelves, and that can change dependent on the company and even the product.  However, these milestones are across the board and remarkable and deserve to be presented here, as does the platitudes that Sony seems to have finally gained some traction with its A7 III release.

This also signifies the first month in a long time that the overall ILC shipments has exceeded in a non-distorted month caused by Sony’s sensor fabrication plant woes.

It seems that the Sony release has boosted the mirrorless value market share into stratospheric heights of 50% overall.  We haven't seen the unit marketshare nudge that much globally so what seems to have happened is that a significant number of higher value units were shipped in April in contrast lower value units which actually dropped for the month.  Significant enough to be factor in the overall industry's numbers for the month.  This sounds very plausible to the be the A7 III release.

It also boosted the marketshare by value in Europe for the first time to 50%, with europe still holding a small 20% share of the overall global market.

This is the first month that Japan has a significantly high mirrorless marketshare as compared to DSLR’s, making DLR’s significantly #2 on the list of ILC segments (again, probably do to Sony’s release of the A7III), as we can see on the regional unit marketshare report by the dramatic drop in DSLR marketshare for the month of April.

How much of these results could be explained with the mass shipment of A7III”s worldwide, quite a bit probably, it will be determined in future months if these patterns were just single or double month spikes that we see around initial shipments, or something more sustainable.

Overall we see that it looks like the industry has indeed bottomed out, and now finally companies can start looking at marketshare and the battles ahead for capturing it.