Originally posted by monochrome Pentax Ricoh could cause a ton of conversation in the next 18 months and force everyone to talk about them (good and bad) at the expense of taklking about the competition.
Ricoh could buy Sigma (family-owned business, the founder-patriarch died last year):
K300 (spring 2013)
K30 (2012)
K3 (summer 2013)
APSc Lenses
L-n (winter 2014)
FF Lenses (DFA Limiteds)
GR (2013)
GX-n (MILC mountors including K-mount, effectively K-02) (fall 2013)
Q20 and accessories (flash), 07 WA (early 2014)
Lenses
MX-2 (early 2014)
WG-extension
Lol, why buy Sigma when you can do a deal with them instead - we help you with your erratically performing Foveon cameras and you help us with your lenses.
Another view is that Pentax Ricoh don't need to do a great amount. They can increase their market share by a bit simply by making the best of what they have and selling it better, which Hoya largely abandoned. The aim is to be a small unit of Ricoh but self-sustaining - no losses, but not needing to do more than generate the cash to run the unit and fund its R&D. Then they sit and wait, because they can afford to. Profits are hard to come by in the photographic industry where so much hardware is being commoditized, which places the really big players in front of a trap. In order to maintain their market share and what profitability they have, the big players have to spend hundreds of millions a year on a big operation and blanket marketing worldwide. If they scale back their spend, they risk their market share and profitability collapsing, but if they continue with their spend, they risk bankrupting themselves because those profits are so hard to find in a time of razor-thin margins. When CEOs and the stock market start to notice, some well-known names could face being put up for sale by their parent corps or become very vulnerable to take-over because their stock price is tanking. At this point a huge corporation like Ricoh, which has sat by and waited it out at almost no cost to themselves, could pick up a bargain 100 times more interesting than Sigma - and could easily afford it too. All wild speculation of course. But outfits like Nikon, Sony cameras, Olympus for example - hmmn, all looking pretty green around the gills financially and boy, do they spend, spend, spend.