| Dommed according to trend
Pentax appears to be doomed because of how its ranking evolved over the last 10 years. Although Pentax benefited from its technological assets and market presence from the full frame film era, several other companies having less legacy or no legacy have outperformed Pentax in the market. In the ranking, Sony and Fuji overtook Pentax in the ranking. It's easy to have a proxy by looked at the user counts in Flicker. If Pentax moved from position 3rd to position 15th in Flicker camera ranking, then what is the next step? Bankruptcy?
Reasons for Pentax to have moved from third market player to minority market player:
Reason#1: Retail presence and after sales service.
Pentax remained an "engineer's" company, having great internal engineering capabilities but not sales and after sales service presence in the market. Only internet sales remained which provide low cost of sales but inferior visibility relative to other players. Today, most shops and retailers have Canon, Nikon, Sony and Fuji and if we ask them why they don't do Pentax , they reply that Pentax service is problematic when customers have issues.
Reason#2: Product road map.
> Lenses: Pentax had a lot of good glass from the film days and did not capitalize on it. For instance, the Pentax limited lenses primes have been designed to be small, but they are no fast and not full frame compatible. Limited used with DSLR has little benefit because of the size of the DSLR itself. Small primes would be relevant with mirroless camera such as the K01 , but then the K01 was discontinued... so, what was the point? For size, the road map of Fuji was consistent because of the size of the camera and the lenses together, and the Fuji primes lenses are faster anyway. Pentax did not re-look the FA 85 1.4, so a lot of people buy sigma 85 1.4 instead. The FA 31, FA 43 and FA 77 have not been updated with coating for digital. So, I'd say , Pentax did not capitalize on its technology assets.
> Cameras: Pentax lost at least one year of engineering and marketing efforts into releasing new products which had not added value for the users. For example, the K-5 should have been the K-5II, the K-3 should have been the K-5IIs, and the Full Frame should have been the K-3. For the entry level, the K-30 was successful, why did Pentax do K-50 and K-500 ? K-50 and K-500 should have been K-S1. So K-50/500 and K-S1 did not sell well, these were just a waste of money and time. The drop of mirrorless line started with K01 (it's light weight for backpackers and should be marketed with the limited) was an error. Now , there will be a full frame in hurry (=more risk to have product failures) because you're late. On top of this, you announced a full frame and you have released the 70-200 tele lens first , but most used is the 24-75 range FF zoom that you may not have. The problem is you have wasted one year on effors for the entry level and one year of efforts in the highend line... so it must be hard to catch-up. Hopefully, Ricoh accept to loose money in the camera business for some time to recover former strategic marketing mistakes.
Reason#3: Product reliability.
If Pentax decide to save money by having no brick and mortar retail presence, and also drop Pentax repair centers. Them, the products should have zero defects, and especially the high end products! Having significant SDM issues on pro-grade lenses , with no strong repair service is simply unacceptable. Same is true for Pentax K-5 and Pentax K-3 mirror flops... Pentax should be responding immediately, asking the ship back the cameras to them directly in order to find the root causes and fix immediately, instead of no reaction from the company. For the K-3, I think, this mirror flop issue had destroyed the market potential for this product.
So , please Pentax, if you want to everything online, (marketing and selling), you must also have online customer service and free shipment for the returns. We know that perfect products do not exists, it can happen that a product has a defect, so when a customer is not lucky to have a defunct product, at least offer this customer a painless repair service. I think Pentax can't do worse to piss off customers in not reacting to product issues.
Reason#4: Brand image.
Interesting was the confusion of Pentax and Ricoh after the acquisition. Some products have still have Pentax, other product changed from Pentax to Ricoh and now changing the Pentax Ricoh back to Pentax. It must be such as childish mess in the management layers of Ricoh-Pentax-Ricoh-Pentax. During M&A, there are always management politics which can severely damage the business performance; sometimes, shareholders may put their hands to resolve to personal battles of the top managers. So, Ricoh, you have to be consistent which the branding of your product lines.
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