Have seen them. He is not too crazy about the mergers. He thinks it
is the strong partner that is most often hurt. Certainly it looks
like he was right about Konica and Minolta. I personally do not see
what Olympus has to gain from Panasonic. Panasonic makes small, noisy
sensors. Even if Oly gets to use the image stabilization in their own
P&S cameras there is no longer much profit in that segment.
Engineering and adding an image stabilization system to Oly, based on
the Panasonic system probably will not add much in sales since both
high volume competitors already have IS. Probably Panasonic will
sell an Oly DSLR with their name on it and possibly a range of
relatively cheap lenses with the Leica name. Either way they will
steal sales from Olympus rather than helping sales especially if they
do like they did with the Leica nameplate, significantly undercut it
in price. So the profit margin for both the Olympus and Panasonic
DSLR turns out to be pretty slim, just when they are trying to
accumulate capital for further development.
He also seems to think sales of DSLRs will peak this year and start
to taper off. Anyone who is not a major player by the end of the year
will face declining sales while the big guys will be playing hard to
maintain their market share. If Oly makes a hit with a really good
E-1 replacement soon their future will be good. It does not look good
for Fuji, or Konica/Minolta/Sony.
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On Feb 17, 2006, at 8:29 PM, Brian Swale wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> http://www.bythom.com/2006predictions.htm
>
> Brian
>
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