Photoclubalpha

Another forum I belong to recommends sticking with Nikon or Canon based on the poster's opinion during these tough economic times smaller manufacturer's may possibly be going out of business due to the strain. I don't think there will be a problem with Sony, but wondered what everyone else thinks. I get so tired of the N/C bias.

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well they are right in a way. but Sony is bigger than both of them by a long shot.. I worry more about Pentax though, it would be a shame to see hoya spin them off or gut it. Canon makes a lot of money but they went away from truly recession proof business a long time ago like the industrial optics and medical equipment. Nikon and olympus are heavily into the medical industry and that will always make money as long as people eat and get sick even though it's a smaller market the profit margins are high. So your poster friend is right and using his logic Sony would be the last man standing... better to tell him to start selling lenses now

A quick look at businessweek shows these revenue figures for each company for the most recent period.

Sony rev. 7 trillion yen
Canon rev. 4 trillion yen
olympus rev 1.1 trillion yen
Nikon rev. 1 trlion yen
Hoya (pentax) 87 billion yen

Sony? A "smaller manufacturer"? I wonder how many of those guys have a Canon television set or a Nikon DVD player in their living room. If horizontal integration can't help a company in tough economic times, I don't know what can!

The only way Sony could get itself into serious trouble is if the CEO and board are trying to take all the day to day decisions. And not delegating enough power down to the the managers of the various functional divisions of the company.

peterottaway wrote:The only way Sony could get itself into serious trouble is if the CEO and board are trying to take all the day to day decisions. And not delegating enough power down to the the managers of the various functional divisions of the company.

If anything, Sony's problem has tended to be the opposite: so much of the day-to-day business is delegated that the company as a whole loses direction and/or does really stupid things. For example, their music business is big, but (like the rest of the music business) is doing quite poorly. At least based on what I've read, its size and existing profitability has been most of what kept Sony out of the portable MP3 player market, even though their background with the Walkman would have given them a tremendous edge there. Portable MP3 players, however, were seen as encouraging copying of music (aka "pirating") and likely to hurt the music business -- so Sony doesn't build them. This, of course, hasn't stopped people from using MP3 players or copying music; it's only stopped Sony from making money when they do.

The encouraging thing is that Sony is already in the camera business, and as far as I can see, it doesn't really present much of a threat to any other part of Sony. The only possible conflict would between the SLR people (mostly ex-Minoltans, obviously) and the existing P&S camera people. I think Sony saw the two as complementary, and I think they're mostly right. I can't imagine there's much competition between the two for resources -- the most obvious one would have been over fabrication resources, but I think that's pretty much gone away since the SLR side went to CMOS sensors instead of CCDs.

Very interesting points. Also, since so many movies are made with Sony equipment and all entertainment areas they are involved with, it didn't seem to me as if there would be a problem. I just choose not to get into the "my camera is better than your camera" argument with them. Great points, thanks for the input.

not to mention that Sony also makes a lot of the sensors and other components that are made into Canon and Nikon cameras

Nikon would be all but non-existent as a company before Sony falls.

Over half of Nikon's revenue comes from Cameras. So a big hit there could be a massive blow. The rest is their semi-conductor equipment manufacturing, and some downturn in tech could hurt them there too. Fair chance that it becomes the main cash flow over cameras during this downturn.

Anyone saying people should run to Nikon and Canon now are just trying to preserve their investment in those systems.

In reality only pentax faces some serious issues. (Consider Fuji and Sigma as walking dead). Olympus might be ok in their new micro 4/3rds niche.