Originally posted by kenspo There is no secret, that Nikon is the company that bleeds the most at the moment. I knew it was bad, but was surprised over how bad it really is, after i got some inside info from a Nikon employee i know. A lot of staff has been laid off, sales are dropping + + Pentax are slowly growing under Ricoh. But as in any business, this can change later on. Thats why nothing is certain.
When market shrinks due to maturity, all camera manufacturers have to reduce their spending budgets to align with sales budgets, including laying off staff if the levers of cost reductions other then manpower are not enough. Nikon and Canon can massively layoff while still having enough momentum and staff to continue product R&D, sales and marketing activities. Bare in mind that below a certain size, a company can't design, make and commercialize a full product line anymore. The merger of Pentax cameras with Ricoh cameras and restructuring certainly gave a bit of oxygen to keep alive for a few years, but they have put all of their limited resources to design one new camera that was postponed (shortage of resources) and they outsourced some of their lens design to third party. So, that indicates that Ricoh-Pentax camera are already reduced to the bones, well, if they have to downsize, that would means death. Before Nikon would run out of business, they'd first downsize to the size of Pentax and then die, but, Pentax would die way before them. There's one exception, that is if the camera market would massively go mirroless and Canikon would fail to adapt (that can happen), but then Sony would be the winning and Pentax would still fall way behind Canikon for this technology because Canon already have develop builtin PDAF on sensor (could be used for mirrorless), while Pentax does not have any of that. Let's be clear, a company does not file for bankruptcy due to financial losses, it usually file for bankruptcy due to sustained periods of negative cash flows and cash failure. Pentax is currently under the cash perfusion of mother Ricoh, which secure Pentax operations with a reserve of cash, otherwise it would not be possible to finance a full frame development for 18 months with the sales of the K-3II.
Last edited by biz-engineer; 01-17-2016 at 11:32 AM.