[RonHendriks1966]

I was looking at camera's overhere, after reading about hard to get products The Sony FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS lens will be hard to get the next three months | Photo Rumors but also saw that somewhere else. So to my surprise at one of the biggest shops that on offer where almost 500 camera options (all types and options), but that 1/3th of them is temporarely out of stock. Some are the new camera's from Photokina, but most of them are camera's having production capacity issues. I think a lot of that is still coming from the quake problems in Japan.

CIPA will come with new figures soon for august. I guess that won't be a party. Even september will be infected. The problems started end of April.

Ricoh will be coming with the financial report for the current and second quarter at the end of october. So it won't be a surprise that sales for the camera business will be much lower then thè previous quarter.

[photoptimist]

Events like these tend to shift sales from one quarter to another rather than kill sales.

Very few people are going to say "Well if I can't buy a Sony FE 70-200mm f/2.8 lens today, I'm never going to buy one!"

This is why Apple stopped reporting first-weekend sales of new iPhones - the numbers say more about short-term supply constraints than actually long-term demand. And its actual long-term demand that matters rather then the short-term noise.

[gaweidert]

I can image that simply getting the chip making machines back up to specs after a shaking like that is looooooooooooooong process. And that without taking into account any possible damage to the building that they are in.

[monochrome]

I can image that simply getting the chip making machines back up to specs after a shaking like that is looooooooooooooong process. And that without taking into account any possible damage to the building that they are in.

I read it takes 3-6 weeks to calibrate the wafer tables. And there were two earthquakes, 3 weeks apart

[reeftool]

Consider the fact that many building sustained some structural damage. This isn't fixed quickly. Floors may no longer be level, walls no longer square. There is probably more involved than just calibrating some machinery. Also, infrastructure like roads and bridges were damaged which must be fixed first before heavy trucks carrying carrying construction equipment, supplies, and raw materials could get to the damaged factories. All this slows down the process. Then there's the displaced workforce who lost homes that need to be rebuilt.

All the affected manufacturers want to get back up and running just as much as we want new cameras and lenses. Actually, even more because not having some new gear is annoying to us but it's severely hurting the profits of these companies.

[RonHendriks1966]

Looks like they lost a lot of sales. Cipa figures for August are like juli and that was bad. The overall loss on sales income over these 8 months is -30% compared to last year. It looks like september will be a bad month too.

http://www.cipa.jp/stats/documents/e/d-201608_e.pdf

[reeftool]

If the low sales figures are quake related and due to unavailable products, they will bounce back nicely. If the figures are low because people are generally satisfied with their current gear and the newer offerings aren't sparking any interest, then they have a much bigger problem. Time will tell.