Japan sales numbers show Canon dominating DSLRs, Olympus leading mirrorless and Nikon tanking across the board

As usual, market research and analysis firm BCN announced its annual BCN Awards, accolades given to photography equipment manufacturers based on sales volume, calculated from data gathered from thousands of retailers across Japan.

Of course, since this is based only on the Japanese market it doesn’t tell the entire story, but it’s interesting nonetheless to get such a broad perspective of how the camera market is doing and seeing who is selling what.

Before diving into the numbers, it’s important to know that all following percentages are based on sales share. This is not a perfectly definitive number, but once again it does give a good perspective of what the photography world is shaping up to look like year after year.

First up is DSLRs. Despite Nikon’s impressive lineup over the past year, Canon once again takes the top spot 56.2%, with Nikon and Ricoh trailing 36.7% and 6.7%, respectively. These numbers show Canon’s market share has increased roughly 2% while Nikons has decreased by almost 3%.

Mirrorless cameras are the next item of business. Taking the top spot away from Sony this year is Olympus with a staggering 34.5%. Sony and Canon trail with 24.8% and 13.6%, respectively. Unsurprisingly, this seems to be the most volatile market. Sony dropped almost 10% from last year, while Olympus grew by more than 12%.

As far as fixed lens cameras go, Canon takes the top spot with 30.5% while Nikon and Casio come in at 2nd and 3rd with 21.0% and 14.8%, respectively. Here, Nikon made the biggest increase in sales shares, posting almost 6% more than last year. However, with point and shoot sales steadily declining, that doesn’t mean much for the Japanese camera manufacturer.

Lens sales are the next state provided by BCN. As has been the trend for quite some time, Canon leads the rank with 24.1%, while Nikon and Sigma trail at 15.2% and 13.5%, respectively. Not much has changed year-over-year, but with Sigma’s growing line-up and ever-impressive performance, that could be changing in the near future.

While not directly related to photography equipment, it’s also interesting to take a look at other equipment, such as memory cards, hard drives and even photography-oriented printers.

As for memory cards, IO data device takes the top spot at 18.5%, with Transcend and SanDisk following at 16.4% and 13.6%, respectively. Solid State Drive (SSD) numbers show Samsung leading the pack at 16.7%, but only by a very small margin. Photo printers are run almost entirely by Canon with 56.6% of sales; Casio is the next closest with 19.4%.

With mirrorless cameras being all of the rage as of the past year or two, it only makes sense that it appears to be the most volatile market. What’s most interesting though is Canon’s third place spot considering how little they seem to promote their mirrorless game.

What are your thoughts on the numbers? Who do you think will take the top spots next year?

Image credits: Kit fotográfico via sukiweb used under CC BY-SA