Originally posted by johnmflores Do you have any data to support these assertions?
CIPA reports from 1999 to August 2017.
In the history of camera manufacturing there is an inverse relationship between size of the market and average cost per unit. In 1999 the average value per unit for digital still cameras was 44,790 Yen (slightly lower in North America, above this average everywhere else) for just over 5 million units. The digital camera market peaked in 2010 with an average value of 13,529 Yen for over 121 million units. The ILC market peaked in 2012 with an average value of 37,365 Yen for 20 million ILC's and by 2016 the average value was 44,760 Yen for less than 12 million units. For YTD August 2017, the average value for ILC's is 49,022 Yen. The entry level market is increasingly being overwhelmed by higher value products, but the total number of cameras being purchased has been dropping. 2017 results indicate that 2016 was rock bottom, which also indicates that what market there is, is driven by repeat purchases of higher value products than what was purchased previously. I can't think of any way to spin that into enough new entrants to the camera market to make a noticeable difference to sales results and it looks like that portion of the business has been increasingly more insignificant since the ILC peak in 2012. After all, ILC shipments dropped 15% in 2013 and now sit at 60% of what they were in 2012.
The camera market in emerging economies (what CIPA started out calling Other and eventually split into Asia less Japan and the other Others, consisting of a variety of smaller camera markets) has only lagged Europe and North America by a year or so and represented a growing percentage of the global total from 5% in 1999 to 28.2% in 2009. That percentage has gone up and down since 2009 and after dropping to 26.8% in 2015 it has picked up to 28.7% in 2016 and 30.2% YTD. With the total digital camera market down 80% since 2010, having Asia and Others doing slightly less worse doesn't provide many opportunities for growth.
Standalone cameras are no longer a mass market product in any way, shape or form; any analysis based on selling cameras like jeans or cell phones, or even relative to the camera market of 5-10 years ago, isn't going to be particularly enlightening.