You can anticipate that Canon camera live a dangerous life since they can only make money beyond a certain market share or absolute revenue due to the fix cost of running sensor fab lines. As soon as a sensor fab line isn't fully loaded , the unit cost of sensor increases because the cost of running a fab line is constant. If Canon would lose some market share (from 40% to 20%) or if the market size for DSLR would shrink (that is the case, actually) or because of some disruptive camera tech coming to market , they'd have to divest their fabs and follow the model of Nikon, Pentax and others, which would further lower the cost of open market sensors and would give even more advantage to camera companies not owning their sensor fabs. Furthermore, the initial cost of new fab lines increasing, the economical model of Canon may not be an advantage anymore in the future. Today, most image sensors employ a 0.13um CMOS base process modified for image sensors (300mm wafers of Sony semiconductors). Canon likely still use 200mm wafers because for 300mm they'd have to replace all of their equipments...Sony semiconductors likely have a unit cost advantage over Canon. In the future, we can anticipate that sensors may move to 90nm or 65nm, if so, Canon would lose the ball and will buy sensor tech from Sony semiconductors. Since Canon is a minority player in semiconductor tech, they'll likely be outpaced by semiconductor specialists (that is already the case today, Canon sensor tech is old...).
---------- Post added 13-11-16 at 10:20 ----------
Originally posted by Nicolas06 Beside, 5millions $ is nothing. 1500 unit at current price, 2500 unit if they selected instead $2000 for the sale price.
Selling price and net profit are two different things. You can't divide NRE buy selling price to get breakeven sales.
---------- Post added 13-11-16 at 10:23 ----------
If Canon has 40% market share, a strategic alliance between all other players would beat Canon down. Industry is a game, there are strategies and counter strategies. I believe, the reason why Canon is still dominant is failure from Fuji, Pentax and al. to ally.
---------- Post added 13-11-16 at 10:32 ----------
Look at semicon. ranking. here.
Semiconductor sales leaders by year - Wikipedia. Mediatek and Qualcomm both do not own their fabs. In year 2000 Mediatek and Qualcomm did not even exist in the top 15. In 2016, Qualcomm displaced Texas Instruments. And Mediatek rose to 10th position.
For Nicolas, you know that Texas Instrument (vertically integrated) who was supplying digital processors to the mobile industry , closed activities and sold its plant in Villeneuve Loubet (France), part of it was sold to Intel.... Qualcomm having no fab quicked them out of the business. Do you understand now?