An article published in the Japanese financial newspaper, Nikkei Shimbun, reports that the country's digital camera market is in the green for the first time in over a decade.
With new flagship releases from Nikon, Sony and Fujifilm, Japan's domestic digital camera market has slowly recovered after the pandemic – and research from Tokyo firm GFK Japan shows that this is now on the upswing. The 2023 sales volume totaled 1.2 million units, a 7% increase from the previous year.
The Nikkei article provides a breakdown of what this entails, stating that the growth was driven by interchangeable lens cameras (which increased by 9% on the previous year) and compact cameras (which grew by 6%). It also notes that after the pandemic, "demand for travel and leisure increased, and sales of digital cameras started on a recovery trend".
It's not just cameras that have seen a positive increase, as interchangeable lens sales also grew by 4%. Japanese third-party lens manufacturers such as Sigma have provided the market with exceptional lens options at a more affordable price than native lenses.
All of this is great news, and long overdue. The Japanese market peaked in 2010, when it reached a total of 10.4 million cameras sold, and has been in a steady state of decline ever since.
The culprit, as it has been all over the world, was the increasing popularity of camera phones for daily photographs, replacing the need for daily snapshot cameras due to their improved capabilities and the ease with which you can share images. Nikkei posits that the smartphone photography trend has come to a halt, and phone cameras have plateaued, explaining the digital camera market's regrowth.
It is uncertain if this reinvigorated market will continue to grow or if 2023 was a uniquely outstanding year for camera sales in Japan. The market expansion shows that the country has now recovered from the events of the pandemic and the microchip supply issues.
We are frequently hearing that Japanese manufacturers are struggling to keep up with the camera demands from the consumer, so this can only mean good news moving forward for the Japanese digital camera market – and the global market, too.
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