Originally posted by kenyee That's what worries me about the K-m/K2000 strategy. AFAIK, selling lots of big macs requires that you have a lot of avenues to sell them to maximize such a high volume business...
The K-m strategy is starting to look like a bunch of Japanese suits falling on their swords. The cheap camera market is heavily numbers driven. If you don't sell enough product, you don't make a profit, and in the low end market, you need very high sales volumes.
Nikon, Canon and Sony have pretty much sewn the low end of the market up (well, the entire market, actually), and are going to be in a price war with each other for market share.
This is good for camera consumers, as it will push camera prices, especially the low end and mid range models, down. As this is where Pentax has chosen to "compete", they are in for a very rough ride.
Canon can pretty much afford to give cameras away if they want to, Sony probably could compete that way as well. I recall that Mitsubishi (a very large Japanese company) owned Nikon at one time, I don't know if this is still the case (or frankly if it ever was), but Nikon can soldier on because they have a primo reputation for making solid cameras.
Hoya is a big enough company to carry the Pentax brand, but will they? When they made the Pentax purchase, they made no secret that what they were really after was the medical and scientific imaging divisions, and that they were taking the camera division because it came along with the deal.
You can bet that if the camera division starts to hemorrhage money or becomes the corporate equivalent of an inflamed appendix, they will drop the brand.
So, you have three bulls in the ring butting heads, and trampling the small players in the process.
As much as I hate to admit it, Mr. Hogan makes a heck of a lot of sense