This comes as a “no surprise” for everyone here. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Olympus said it will eliminate its V series of compact cameras – the cheapest in its lineup, selling for less than $200. Its camera business posted a loss in the last fiscal year through March, because demand for compact cameras turned out to be weaker than expected, the company said.“. Olympus will focus their resources on the mirrorless system cameras and on high end compact cameras. As I told you a couple of days ago expect a new OMD and a new high end compact fixed lens camera to be announced within the next 3-4 months!
Japan Times also reports about Olympus current financial situation: “Olympus Corp. said Wednesday it returned to the black in fiscal 2012 with a group net profit of ¥8.02 billion, compared with a loss of ¥48.99 billion in the previous year, due partly to an improvement in its medical instrument business. But its imaging business, mainly consisting of digital cameras, logged an operating loss of ¥23.07 billion, posting a third straight year of red ink that weighed on the firm’s earnings. Olympus reported an operating profit of ¥35.08 billion, down 1.2 percent, on sales of ¥743.85 billion, down 12.3 percent. With the market for compact digital cameras rapidly shrinking, Olympus set its sales target for compact cameras at 2.7 million units for the current business year, compared with 5.1 million units in fiscal 2012. It will continue to focus on development and sales of mirrorless cameras, while drastically reducing its lineup of compact cameras. In its medium-term business plan through fiscal 2016, Olympus revised upward its consolidated operating profit projection to a record ¥143 billion from an earlier forecast ¥130 billion, on an expected increase in medical business sales supported by the weakening yen. For the current business year through next March, Olympus expects to post a group net profit of ¥30 billion and a consolidated operating profit of ¥71 billion, on sales of ¥700 billion.”
One more thing: The real challenge for Olympus is their 2-3 year strategy to compete in the high end digital camera market. Full Frame cameras are gettign cheaper and the competition in the mirrorles market is growing…
46 Responses
Pana should do the same as well , quit the low end cameras business . Concentrate on highend cameras & lenses are the right things to do .
Pana really need something very very special to compete against the incoming OMD Pro !
+1
Focusing on low-end and mid-end compact cameras is no longer a good way, it’s a lost war.
Yeah,and Pany kept top secret ,i never saw images and specs leak from Pany on this site,
at least 1 day before they (Pany) announce.
“i never saw images and specs leak from Pany on this site, at least 1 day before they (Pany) announce”
GF5 and GF6 were leaked long before the announcement. Remember the model that got fired because she had taken a photo of GF5 during the promo shoot?
You said it yourself. She got fired. What more could Pany have done? Seriously, you act like the cameras are top secret military projects or something, so endangering Panasonic’s “national security” that no leaks at all are tolerated. No, it just impacts a marketing plan. Making sure it doesn’t leak is not the goal. Making sure the same person group doesn’t have a second chance to do it to you, that is the goal.
Anyway, that GF6 review article leak came out ONE day early. Come on!
“GF6 review article leak came out ONE day early”
http://www.43rumors.com/ft5-first-images-of-the-new-panasonic-gf6/ April 4, 2013
http://www.43rumors.com/continually-updated-panasonic-gf6-officially-announced/ April 9, 2013
ONE day?
sorry to GF5,but you had notice GF6/G6 they (webs) were posted hand-on preview 1 day early.
Sure, the compact business is declining, but Panasonic compacts sell. Nobody is checking for a Olympus compact, it’s either Canon, Nikon, Sony and Panasonic.
To be honest, the only customer Olympus has is its fanboys. That’s why they can get away with nickel and diming it’s customers.
Look at most sale charts… Olympus stays on the bottom.
This Oly/Pana “fanboy” bashing is what makes 43rumors unbearable. Please, get off the internet and do something more productive with your life.
“Pana really need something very very special to compete against the incoming OMD Pro !”
A Panasonic comment on a post that really has NOTHING to do with Panasonic.
Everybody here knows there’s a Olympus “Bias” and Panasonic “bashing” here. And we all know it’s Majority Olympus fanboys bashing anything Panasonic here.
So, let me fix your comment, free of charge:
“This Panasonic bashing is what makes 43rumors unbearable. Please, get off the internet and do something more productive with your lives.”
Because that is truly what it is around these parts.
“Look at most sale charts… Olympus stays on the bottom.”
In the most promising market – mirrorless – Oly is #1.
Nope, no its not
Yun – what? Olympus struggles, in part because it can’t compete with the Panasonic lineup, so that means Panasonic should also quit that market, one where they are doing better, relatively, than MANY of their other businesses, and now have less competition?
What? Do you know anything about business?
Their challenge is to break out of the straight jacket culture imposed by the over 60 old guard and to embrace the 21C
Things look dire indeed, not only for Olympus but for most camera manufacturers. Ironically, the “blame” is on imaging technology itself. Cameras have become so good there is no more objective reason to replace them. Unlike the situation 6-7 years ago when every iteration made cameras significantly more useful, these days the improvements are minor and encompass only marginal aspects of photography (remote operation, compatibility with old lenses etc.)
Losing the lowest tier of the product lineup is only sensible, but will hardly suffice. In the next five years more products are bound to cease existing, leaving only highly specialized (such as the TG line) and high quality (such as m4/3) products. The sooner Olympus re-organizes the more profitable it will be.
The long-term strategy should be seeking future technologies and being the first to bring them to market. It may sound like science fiction at the moment, but IMO wearable cameras and liquid lenses are fields to be explored, as well as solutions for high quality photography in extreme environments. Oh, and to increase revenue in the short term Olympus can always utilize its expertise and manufacture lenses for other brands.
…AND selling optional lens hoods at absurd prices!!! 🙂
While that’s becoming true for the high end, for low end consumer cameras it’s really all cell phones. Six or seven years ago, if you wanted a camera at all, you got a compact digital. Parents would buy their teens one for a trip, they’d snap a couple shots that would be forgotten, it’d end up broken within the next year or two, and then the cycle would repeat. That market has almost been completely replaced by cell phones and is the one that Olympus (and by some accounts Panasonic) is dumping.
Spot on.
Just like the PC industry we are now at a stage where what we have is sufficient to use until it dies a “natural death”.
Manufacturers will have to create other must have features and we are starting to see that with things like built in WiFi, GPS, Super high res EVF’s and so on.
Then once they have exhausted these features it will be about who can put it together into the most coherent and usable package, just like Apple did when it took a whole bunch of existing technologies and packaged them together into something that was greater than the sum of its parts.
And regardless, it is not a bad thing for society if we slow down consumer purchase cycles.
With that horrible burnt orange, is that any surprise? :p
Admin, do you expect both cameras to be announced around the same time or will they be weeks or months apart?
I think most camera makers have far too many compact cameras in their line ups and Olympus is no exception. Slimming down the amount of compact cameras they offer and getting rid of the overlapping models would help them and less tech savy consumers in my opinion.
Well, someone had to blink first. Good move by Olympus, another first for them in camera-making business :). Now, as many here were suggesting, they are left with superzooms, waterproof and premium compacts. With waterproof and large sensor phones already appearing, it’ll be a challenge to remain profitable in those categories as well.
Here in Japan, Oly addresses two very different markets with the Tough series: first, the outdoor user, and second, the construction industry. They pretty much own the market for the latter, with the largest general contractors using Oly. This is partly due to the fact that Oly sells software for construction site photo management: logical, efficient, and ugly (i.e. professional). And when the general contractors use them, the trickle-down effect to sub-, sub-sub-, and sub-sub-sub-contractors is rather substantial I reckon.
Just offering a different perspective to your comments 🙂
Interesting. I am myself in the construction industry, but here in Serbia, mobile phones are what is mostly used in the jobsites. I show up with E-PL1 from time to time and often get asked what newspaper I am working for :).
Yep, the smartphone cameras wiping out the cheap compacts. Who would have thought? 🙂 Soon all will follow, the cheap compact cameras are soon to be extinct.
Not until people realise they don’t need a zoom. (You would think digital zoom would have eliminated that need already, but it has never been the same for more than 2x, even the with the very highest of pixel counts).
It doesn’t take a genius to shut down a branch that makes heavy loses. How about shutting down branches that are making some losses but are about to make heavy ones? That takes vision.
It’s about time
Soon there will be no Olympus. It’ll be absorbed by Sony. They will slowly fall back until they’re limited to a few bodies and then Sony will step in completely.
Olympus is trying to play catch up, but I think it’s too late. Black, Unlimited Lenses (finally), ceasing compacts, nice try but too late.
With steady competition from Sony and Fuji, when has to ask if MFT will be strong enough to compete and lead the Mirrorless market. Not to mention Canon and Nikon knocking on Mirrorless door.
Nah, my guess is that a good chunk of R&D and marketing costs for their medical products are being booked in the Imaging division. My damaged brain cells can’t come up with another explanation for why Oly never fancies closing or selling off its Imaging division — it’s constantly been in the red in accounting terms, and there must be a rational reason.
Olympus (the name) may survive by just selling off the camera division to Sony or Panasonic, and focus on the Medical division.
TG-3 with raw, 20 meters deep
GH5: mar sensor!, 25/50/1080p raw, high bitrates/colors in better codec, better EVF, if possible better battery life. Better C-AF would be a bonus. Better display (for legacy lenses)
OMD Pro with – will we ever gonna get it? – 4/3 ratio LCD, better video mode: stock GH2 level is a start point. UniWB option with/in .dng format, auto iso in M(ode).
All manufactures are welcome to buy Samyang 10/2.8 and glue m43 bayonet on it or better, make 6-12mm f/2.8 zoom.
Olympus could announce 150mm macro development, sale from June, 1st 2014.
Panasonic could announce 17/1.2DG OIS and 300/2.8 OIS development, sale from June, 1st 2014.
Sigma could announce 25/1.8 and 100mm f/2.8 macro (for 30-50% price of Olympus 150)
Tamron could announce 12-60/4, hq optics, friendly price.
and last but not least
CV could announce 12mm f/.95 🙂
I have a TG1. Nice camera, but it would be great if it shot RAW. I took some pretty nice shots snorkeling in St. John USVI a few weeks ago, but it would be so much better if they were RAW and not nasty JPEGs. Tweaking underwater JPEGs, there’s not much that can be done without further degrading the image.
I’ll take a Voigtländer 12mm f0.95, too! But that would be one big-ass chunk of a lens!
What is MAR sensor?? or Mars or Alien sensor!!!
MAR = Multi-Aspect Ratio
One of the best features of the GH2!
@Admin
Hi maybe it would be an idea to disallow people from trolling so much especially with multiple identities on the same post….
where is this trolling?
Youdidntdidyou, is that you or an imposter?
It’s not so much the multiple identities that I find annoying, but rather the creepy multiple personalities. Then there are those who have several usernames but always the same avatar!
Here and only here can a post like that can be seen as “a good decision by oly”. As if they had a choice…
There has been too much trolling lately!
A 1 inch sensor should be any camera company’s starting point. Cell phones and their derivatives with smaller sensors will own the glance and discard photo market where quality is irrelevant.
I think it’s probably for the best that Only don’t make any more cheap compact cameras. I bought one of their luminous coloured compacts and it’s rubbish. I don’t think it was ever tested by only – shutter speed dropped to sixth of a second while I so remained low, resulting in useless pictures. The interface, despite looking slick in the shop, is slow and irritating to use. Luckily I only need it for when I need an unpretentious cheap looking camera.
I think it’s probably for the best that Only don’t make any more cheap compact cameras. I bought one of their luminous coloured compacts and it’s rubbish. I don’t think it was ever tested by only – shutter speed dropped to sixth of a second while I so remained low, resulting in useless pictures. The interface, despite looking slick in the shop, is slow and irritating to use. Luckily I only need it for when I need an unpretentious cheap looking camera.
I think leaving the low end is a correct decision. Hardware wise that is. Now that mobile phones and such are getting more and more powerful i think that the engineers should work on apps that wil provide the”Olympus” feeling and quality to mobile units. Nobody does it better now, so why not?
They failed at building a digital compact as popular or industry leading as the original Olympus Mju II, therefore they have given up. They have chosen another battle.
“If a battle cannot be won, do not fight it.” – Sun Tzu
My last compact camera (some Kodak model with HD video) stopped working recently and goes into my museum (of old cameras). I discovered failure when wanted to take it with me to my trip to Japan – I did not use it for couple of years. Did I rush to buy new a compact camera? No, I have Android phone with nice camera and HD video that fits into my pants packet. True Kodak had noticeably higher image quality and optical zoom but was less convenient to carry around that cell phone and I would rather carry around E-P1 I have – which it is small enough while having significantly better IQ. BTW I have no reason to upgrade from E-P1 either – for all intends and purposes it is a nice camera and there is no point of spending extra $1000 and upgrading to E-P5 just for marginal improvement. I would be tempted by E-M5 though when it gets discounted because of EVF.
But if I would buy compact disposable camera I would rather choose Canon, not Olympus.