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The shrinking camera sales will kill Canon-Nikon plans for a FF mirrorless?

Infographic: Are Smartphones Killing Digital Cameras? | Statista

This is just a pure speculation based on a simple fact: The interchangeable system camera market sales are dropping since 2012. And we can assume this trend will continue for the coming years.

I was wondering how that fact would influence the roadmap of companies like Canon and Nikon. I am no marketing expert but my guess would be that Canon and Nikon would do that:

  1. Reduce investments and costs in the current traditional camera market
  2. Focus investments on new areas with potential growth (small cameras for the car industry, optics for the medical business and so on)

The question is: Would a heavy investment in a new FF mirrorles system pay off? The answer seems to be no. Because the mirrorless system market isn’t doing well neither, nor is there any forecast predicting any kind of growth. So to me it sounds logical that whatever Canon and Nikon’s plan was to enter the FF mirrorless system market…they might as well kill it now.

UPDATE: I aligned the graph to show how much system camera sales (in red) declined between 2012 and 2015:

systemsale

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