CIPA’s Lens Data Reflects the Core Photo Industry’s Impressive Stability

Following yesterday’s breakdown of digital camera shipments from 2007 through 2024, it’s time to look at CIPA’s interchangeable lens data.

The same caveats apply when discussing lenses as when looking at camera data. CIPA only tracks the production of Japanese manufacturers. While this includes the major players, like Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Sigma, Sony, and more, it omits some well-known companies. Further, production and shipment numbers do not necessarily align perfectly with sales. However, they will be very close — plenty close enough to discuss the numbers and emerging broad trends.

While CIPA’s data on digital camera shipments is available back to 2007, lens data goes back even further to 1999. However, it was not until 2011 that CIPA split lens data into full-frame (and larger) and APS-C and smaller categories, which is what this article looks at. Photographers interested in digging into how many leaf-shutter lenses were manufactured in Japan in 2003, or how many medium and large-format lenses were made in 2005, CIPA’s archives are a treasure trove.

With that housekeeping out of the way, it’s time to pore over 13 years of lens manufacturing data.

Looking first at total lens manufacturing numbers from 2011 through 2024, the decrease in APS-C and smaller lens production is much more dramatic than the dip in the full-frame (and bigger) space. This aligns with the chart PetaPixel looked at yesterday that broke down digital camera shipments by camera type. The decrease in shipments for cameras with built-in lenses trends with the fall in APS-C and smaller lenses.

The immediate response is: “Well, sure, but the camera dip was for cameras without lenses altogether.” Yes, but the lens data reflects a shrinking “consumer” photography market, which is broadly reflected across the digital photography landscape. While the people who bought fewer compact cameras are not the same people who bought fewer APS-C and smaller interchangeable lenses, they occupy a similar market segment — people whose photographic needs have been increasingly satisfied by smartphones.

It is also worth hammering home how stable the full-frame and larger lens space has been, even as the digital camera industry went into freefall. In some crucial ways, this speaks to the health of the core photography market. While the once-dominant entry-level photography space is now the playground of smartphones, photographers have never stopped buying lenses.

Something important that CIPA’s data omits is which companies are manufacturing which lenses. While Canon and Nikon’s DSLR era is long gone, both companies produced many APS-C DSLRs and lenses in the 2010s. Photographers couldn’t step foot in a Best Buy without tripping over a bunch of $500-ish DSLR kits. The continual reduction in the number of manufactured APS-C lenses speaks to the death of this camera class.

However, one should not view the shrinking red bar as an indictment of APS-C and Micro Four Thirds camera systems — many professionals use each. Based on this data, it is impossible to speak to the health of something like the Fujifilm X Series, for example. However, based on conversations with numerous industry insiders over the past few years and with the aid of real-world evidence, Fujifilm’s APS-C X Series cameras and lenses are extremely popular.

The sub-full-frame segment is relatively smaller than a decade ago, but there is reason to believe that the companies that have remained there are financially strong. Sub-full-frame lens manufacturing has stabilized over the past five years, and there’s ample evidence to suggest Fujifilm is an utterly dominant force there, while the similarly-sized full-frame market is being split in three primary ways.

Image credits: Featured image created using a public domain image asset.