Canon is Cautiously Ramping Up Production of Compact Cameras Again
The sudden surge in demand for compact cameras may have caught some camera manufacturers off guard after years of systematic decline. Canon wants to respond to this sudden resurgence but will do so cautiously.
The announcement of the PowerShot V1, which coincided with the CP+ show in Yokohama, Japan at the end of February, is timely considering how the market is moving now, since Canon’s production of PowerShot-branded cameras had previoiusly fallen off steeply.
“Obviously we do want to respond to demand with this model,” Manabu Kato, Unit Executive in Canon’s Imaging Business Operations, says, speaking of the V1 during an interview with PetaPixel.
“But even with our existing products, we are planning on ramping up the production so that we can meet market demand. We actually feel very bad for our customers because we have a huge backlog and we’ve freely been keeping them waiting. So to our teams, we are continuing to instruct them to ramp up production but even though we are increasing production, the demand is actually growing even stronger. So it’s as if we constantly have a backlog on our orders,” he continues.
“We cannot give you an answer as to when we will have worked through the backlog, but we promise you that we will be very committed to full-on production this year. So we hope that everyone can be patient and wait for us to come through.”
Canon used to produce a majority of its compact PowerShot cameras in a factory in China — that facility closed in 2022 due to a dramatic collapse in digital camera sales globally, led by the demand for compact point-and-shoots drying up nearly entirely.
“Compared to the market’s peak, compact cameras have gone down to about 1/40 in size and it looks now as if it is coming back up again. And I think us as well as other companies have expected the compact camera market to continue to shrink. So we have continued to decrease the production over time. So we were on a continuous decline for production, but I suppose that the demand has actually plateaued somewhere along the way and that’s where we see a huge gap now with the supply. Therefore I think we need to be very cautious in monitoring the market to see if there really is going to be an upswing,” Go Tokura, exectutive vice president and head of the Imaging Group at Canon, explains.
When Canon closed that factory in China, it was because the digital camera market hit a new low, with global digital camera shipments dipping to just over eight million units, down from 120 million units in 2010. But Canon is expressing a desire for caution because it is informed by how much it could lose by over-extending to chase what might be a flash-in-the-pan fad.
That said, Canon does want to increase production and meet demand — it’s not going to leave customers without options. However, it won’t do so without a strategy.
“We’re basically continuing to sell what was available several years ago, but the customers have continued to change. I think there are now more and more people who are taking videos. So I think we should probably not continue to sell the exact same models that were available a few years ago. We should try to accommodate what the current users are doing. So if they’re doing more videos and we should do something like this where we have more video capabilities,” Tokura concludes, referring to the PowerShot V1.
Image credits: Canon
