Originally posted by biz-engineer Canon have 60% market share, Fuji have more than Pentax, they can be profitable out of lower margin products through sales of higher quantities. Pentax can't. That's the why Pentax KP. Pentax KP is built like entry level reuse of the K3 gut cost reduced (smaller buffer), but priced like a K3.
---------- Post added 11-02-18 at 12:19 ----------
There is a reason: they have a new CEO and he said they would only keep high margin products.
I can imagine on a CEO visit to Ricoh Imaging offices, an employee raised his hand and said:
"Dear CEO, I understand that you only want us to design products with 60%+ gross margin, but I read Pentax forums, and they said Canon offer entry level camera at low margin".
The CEO replied:
"Dear loyal employee san, who is Pentax forums?, and since when they decide our strategy?"
"Dear employee san, if we look at how many Pentax K70 unit were sold, we actually sold much less K70 than Pentax K1 over the same period"
"Lets be pragmatic, if the full frame sells in more quantities at much higher margin than entry level apsc, we will focus resources on the product that make the most money"
After CEO answer, all Japanese in the room bowed the CEO, followed by a moment of deep silence.
You know, Japan is not like California or France where people go on strike when disagreeing. In Japan, total respect to senior management is the norm.
It is hard for me to argue since you have access to secret board meetings whereas I don't.
I would say that generally speaking, Pentax needs to have some camera in the 500-600 dollar range in order to feed the upper end cameras. If you tell me that they actually lost money on the K-70s then I suppose it would be reasonable to drop that line, but even if they made 10 dollars a camera, it is still probably worth it so that are new entry level photographers entering the Pentax brand. Otherwise, what is the point of having lenses like the 18-55/55-200/18-135 in the lens line up?