CIPA for May 2018 – Continued signs that the market has leveled

The big takeaway for May 2018 results is that it does tend to appear that the market has indeed leveled, as the shipments for this year continue to keep pace with last year’s shipments for interchangeable lens cameras.  This spells good news for the industry that is still reeling over the continued hemorrhaging of the compact camera market. 

As far as drilling into the details.  You can see that either Sony has had problems in shipping the A7 during this month as all numbers related to mirrorless fell and most importantly which identifies it was most likely the A7 causing this; was the fact that the per unit value shipped for mirrorless plummeted from last month.

As far as Mirrorless overall, the overall shipments of mirrorless units didn’t really suffer, as other units must have started shipping in mass volume in May, but those units were far cheaper than the Sony A7.

If we drill down a little more into the mirrorless shipments, it is evident that Asia continues its overall dominance of the mirrorless market.

Predicted outlooks are difficult, especially on a Photokina year.  Looking at the results, we are starting to feel like we can safely predict that the rest of 2018 should follow closely to the shipment values of 2019 for the remainder of the year, with a little more of a bump up for Photokina announcements and related shipments.  If Sony needs to ship more A7’s too meet demand post CIPA may, then we should see stronger performances from mirrorless with a jump back up in unit values as Sony ships more.