Originally posted by beholder3 Looking at the most recent data does seem to be better than looking at older data, yes.
Newer data does need to be looked at, you are quite correct in this, but it needs to be looked at in context, not just a single month as throughout a single year the figures will vary, a point identified in your post after the one I'm quoting here. That post is a better representation of the Jan 18 figures as you can see what it looks like compared to 2016 and 2017.
But to play 'what if', lets look at a single month in isolation and I choose Jan 17. A post focusing on those shipments could be way more positive and rightly so considering the increase compared to Jan 16. So looking at a month in isolation is a bad way of understanding the broader picture and you would become very poor indeed if you adopted that approach when buying and selling on the share market. What your post does show is the shipments are down compared to the two previous years. That alone doesn't tell us much other than maybe the 2017 up tick was more anomalous that the industry would want.
And that's all my post was about, the picture is bigger than one month and you should weigh those figures against the longer time frame. And as a photography enthusiast I don't like where the ILC market is heading but it is reality and the photographic market is a moving ball and all companies have to continue to find ways to stimulate the market back into growth or understand what the new reality is and be the first to adjust to those conditions to have the best chance for survival.
For example, with Ricoh I think the GR could be huge in this context if the soon to be announced GR III is everything that people are wanting out of the update. For me Sony turns models over too quickly, so a more stable model that works well could be big for the company. All opinion of course but it could be the type of innovation that Ricoh need to maintain relevance in the market.
I reckon this phase in the industry is still a work in progress and it would be interesting to see if there's graph data for the transition from film to digital stills cameras as it would have been on a similar scale of disruption as that represented by smart phones on the digital camera market. I can't find the data here:
CIPA - Camera & Imaging Products Association: Digital Cameras but I reckon that would be an interesting comparison; YMMV of course. What happened is now a matter of history but to compare the two 'phases of disruption' is the kind of thing that would interest me.
Mate, please don't think I was having a go, this is too good a place to visit for anything adversarial and that was certainly not my intent. I don't know how much lower the figures are going to get, but it's not unreasonable to assume continued contraction in the digital ILC market and the steady replacement of DSLR sales for mirrorless. We could revisit this discussion in Feb 19, it might be good for a giggle.
Tas