Nikon camera is the brand of which country (why photographers use Nikon)

Once upon a time, there was a photography craze in China, and many photographers spent money on high-end cameras. But today, it seems that not many people will go back to buy such products. How did once-popular cameras fade into history?

Japanese camera makers have always been absolutely dominant in the industry, such as Nikon, Canon and Sony. However, these Japanese companies, which have long dominated the market, are fading away because of the rise of Chinese companies.

First, take Nikon as an example. As a century-old brand founded in 1917, it officially set up its Shanghai headquarters in 2005. Since then, its market share in China has soared. Until 2010, when there was a photography boom in the country,

Nikon sold as many as 17.77 million units in a year, and even took 30 percent of China's market share.

Canon had a similar experience. As a global camera maker, Canon's global share is a whopping 47.9 percent, but even these two powerful Japanese companies have had their day.

Since 2017, Nikon has been downsizing its business, laying off 2,268 employees in China within a year. In June this year, it even closed its Japanese factory and moved to Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, in 2020, Nikon's global sales stood at 840,000 units, down 95 percent from a decade ago. In the first two quarters of this year, Nikon lost 56.2 billion yuan in total profit, almost entirely because of the rise of Chinese companies.

With the rise of smartphone products around the world, more and more cell phone makers have begun to add photographic capabilities, severely compressing the viability of digital cameras.

Compared with a few thousand dollars of cell phones, a good camera lens can easily be tens of thousands of dollars, and the rate of replacement is very frequent, the average family can not afford to use the camera.

So Nikon, Canon and other brand-name companies lose on price first. Not only that, with the increase in China's market share Among the global cell phone brands, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and other well-known products began to focus on camera features.

Even these product companies are cooperating with lens manufacturers from Europe. For example, Huawei is supported by Leica, VIVO is supplied by Zeiss, and even Hasselblad from Sweden has begun to actively seek cooperation with Chinese brands, which means that the market share of Japanese lenses in China has further declined.

In 2020, the world's major digital camera makers sold a total of just 8.88 million units, less than half of Nikon's total a decade ago, and a 93 percent decline from the total size of a decade ago.

But traditional camera makers like Nikon aren't willing to wait and see. They keep adding to the VR camera, security camera and other areas, hoping to overtake the car at the bend. However, the facts have once again disappointed them. VR camera system from Xiaomi has begun to layout in various fields, Nikon China to find another way out of the development plan has suffered a heavy blow.

Canon's reliance on infrared camera technology has also been pushed to the edge of the industry by the early entry of Hikvision and Dahua.

In terms of current industry developments, Japanese companies that once monopolized the domestic camera industry are trying to quotsteal the rice bowl quot with Chinese cell phone brand makers. In fact, it's hard for them to compete with Chinese cellphone brand makers in the international market.

Here some people may ask, operating for hundreds of years of Japanese companies will disappear on the stage of history? In fact, as the market continues to expand, traditional cameras still have great prospects for development. For example, some of the new miniature cameras in recent years are traditional digital products. With such new product development, Nikon and other companies are still hoping to once again realize an increase in industry share.

And now Ophiophoton and other Japanese companies are also constantly research and development of higher precision and clarity of the lens, and has even obtained orders for cooperation with car companies. In the future, Nikon, Canon and other Japanese companies will have less and less room for development.

However, the current domestic cell phone brand manufacturers also need to be vigilant. Japanese company Canon has acquired competitors in the same industry worldwide. In the two years after 2015, it spent hundreds of billions of yen on a succession of Swiss and Japanese camera companies. If it expands its scale and integrates its technology, Canon can still hope to make a comeback in traditional lens production.

How will the traditional camera industry change in the future? What do you see differently?

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