Originally posted by nostatic As for the April-June quarter, sales sank 19% on the year to 205.1 billion yen, and operating profit dropped 35% to 11.3 billion yen. The year-on-year drop was mainly attributed to a stronger yen. On a quarterly basis, however, the digital camera division turned into the black in the last quarter, posting a profit of more than 300 million yen. In the January-March period, the division suffered an 8.8 billion yen loss.
The PEN is hardly the reason for the increased profit during that quarter - it only hit the stores in late June. I'd attribute a profit increase to the Styluses and the E-620. Not to say the E-P1 doesn't seem to be doing quite well...
Originally posted by Eigengrau Keynote is a massively better program than powerpoint - the transitions are more professional and it is much more flexible.
As boring as the Mac vs PC arguments are for someone who's been a Mac user for 22 years, this is such a great point. Forget about the "creative" software, if you're like me, then you're forced to spend a lot of time preparing presentations for client meetings etc. And once I discovered Keynote, that time actually became bearable, almost enjoyable. All the talk of style over substance seems to come from people without a clue, who have spent a very limited amount of time on a Mac. Once you actually use them for
work, you start to realise just how good they are.
As for Pentax... I don't see any immediate concerns. Hoya has already invested $1 billion and been forced to take another $122 million in losses. They obviously want to turn it around and at least get their initial investments back. Selling the company now would most likely force them to take massive write-offs. I think the optics line of thinking could very well be what they have in mind as well. Pentax already has a fairly developed and very good lens lineup. As much as we would like certain lenses currently not available, they can cater to a broad variety of users and needs. The big costs thus won't come from lens R&D, and provided the lenses sell well enough, they should be turning a quite nice profit there.
(This could also be the reason why we've seen massive price hikes on specific lenses: they simply were unprofitable at their previous price points and Hoya/Pentax were forced to either increase prices or seize production).
Developing new and competitive cameras is where the bulk of their R&D costs will lie. For such a small brand, it might not be possible to continue to develop their own cameras, and we just might see a reversed case of badge engineering, where Pentax slaps its brand onto SLRs made by another manufacturer, with a few tweaks to make it more "Pentax". This is similar to what Fujifilm did (although they put their own sensor into the cameras), but the difference is of course that Pentax has a unique mount, hence, they can't just buy cameras from another brand, they need an alliance.
At the very least, they'll need a long term partner for the sensors... Fujifilm, Sony, Kodak...?
Thomas