In the 1970s, the American imaging giant Kodak invented the earliest digital camera in the world. However, this revolutionary product did not bring continuous profits to the company. In 2012, this century-old shop fell to the threshold of the digital imaging era. . In the digital era, the giants in the market are the Nikon and Canon companies in Japan, and most photography enthusiasts can only choose between either. However, Nikon has also encountered operating difficulties recently. If it does not care, it may even become the second Kodak.
100-year-old shop spans the era
This year has been a commemorative year in the history of Nikon, but the decline in performance has diluted the joy.
In the year of 1917, 100 years ago, the optical measuring instruments division of Tokyo Keiki Co., Ltd. and the mirror division of Iwaki Glass Co., Ltd. merged and became a company named Nippon Optical Co., Ltd. Afterwards, Fujii Lens Manufacturing Co., Ltd. was merged, which laid the foundation for Nikon's future development.
At the time, Nikon hired eight optical experts in Germany plus its own 200 employees to produce telescopes, microscopes and optical measuring instruments. In the 1930s, the company produced photographic lenses and launched the Nikkor brand.
In 1946 after the end of World War II, Nikon launched its first rangefinder fuselage, which was marketed in 1948. This is the first camera to be named after Nikon. Afterwards, many reporters used Nikon products when they went to the first site to make reports. Their sharp and sharp lenses and their light and strong body made the company famous. Since then, Nikon has continuously released a lot of classic lenses and fuselage, which has laid a benchmark position in the field of photographic equipment.
In the era of film, Nikon has a great deal of work such as the F3 camera, and in the digital transformation of the 1990s, compared with Kodak, once the overlord, Nikon also responded quickly. In 1999, Nikon took the lead in introducing a professional-grade digital SLR camera that priced below $6,000, which once changed the face of the entire professional digital SLR market. It is not only lower in price than Kodak products, but also more compact. Many news and advertising agencies were attracted by the price and performance of Nikon digital cameras and began to turn digital.
Driven by professional cameras, civilian digital cameras have also entered a period of booming growth. Nikon, which introduced a number of entry-level digital camera products, has also gained substantial revenues from this "group of wolf tactics."
Good scenery is no longer broken
For Nikon, the digital era has brought prosperity and decline, and its performance has fallen in the past three years. However, even more so that corporate managers scratch their head, is that the current situation is not competitors to come up with a "phenomenon" level of products, but the entire camera industry has been hit.
The position on the brand value list can best show Nikon's decline in recent years. According to the ranking of Japanese corporate brand values ​​compiled by Interbrand, a US consulting firm, the value of Nikon’s “Nikon†brand dropped 29% year-on-year to US$1.5 billion, relegating from No. 10 of the previous year to No. 16. In 2016, Nikon's brand value dropped by 30%, ranking only 21st. In 2017, it dropped 4th to 25th.
The significant decline in Nikon brand value is due to the inability to adapt to changing user needs. With the rise of smart phones, the compact digital camera market is rapidly shrinking. Comparing the dazzling camera features of Apple's new products, there is an in-depth understanding of this alternative. After smart phones “killed†MP3 players, calculators, pedometers, and other small appliances, Nikon’s small digital cameras that brought rolling profits became the next target. According to statistics from the US investigation company IDC, the global camera supply in 2016 was 81 million units, which was only a little more than half of the peak period in 2010. The main reason is the decrease in the demand for compact digital cameras competing with smart phones.
Nikon’s financial situation has fallen. After its highest annual revenue of 75.4 billion yen in the peak of the digital boom in fiscal 2007, the company's earnings have been declining year by year, to 18.2 billion yen in fiscal year 2015, and a loss of 9 billion yen in the previous fiscal year. .
To rectify the situation, Nikon announced a reduction of approximately 1,000 employees in Japan last year, which is equivalent to 10% of the company's total domestic employees in Japan. Recently, it has also reported that it intends to close down a factory in China. In addition to layoffs, Nikon is also reducing its product line. Last year, Nikon Japan announced that it would abandon the introduction of three models of the "DL Series" advanced digital cameras priced at about 100,000 yen (approximately RMB 6,000). Due to the intensification of low-price model competition, it is increasingly difficult to ensure the impact of factors such as profitability. Japanese manufacturers have been vigorously developing high-end models of about 100,000 yen. Nikon had planned to use the DL series digital camera as a trump card to improve its profitability, but it found defects before its listing. Although it has been working on the development of this series of models since then, it has no hope of eventually abandoning the listing due to profitability.
Where is the road to transformation difficult?
Nikon's plight is the epitome of the entire camera industry. According to the 2016 digital camera and lens production and shipment data released by the Japan International Camera and Imaging Equipment Industry Association, the production and shipment of cameras and lenses decreased year after year in 2014, 2015 and 2016. The industry has entered a difficult period.
Under the impact of smart phones and mobile software, the traditional competitive advantage of specialized consumer electronics equipment is no longer the case. Traditional image giants such as Nikon have also been forced to embark on the transition. The development or transformation toward diversification is a trend in the development of these enterprises in recent years. Among them, Canon acquired Swedish camera giant Axis for 330 billion yen to enter the surveillance camera field. After selling the PC business, Sony focused on games and entertainment. According to Sony's second-quarter earnings report for fiscal year 2017, Sony's sales revenue was 2.0625 billion yen, a year-on-year increase of 22.1%, which was mainly attributable to the growth of games and network services business.
In contrast, Nikon's transitional road does not seem to be smooth. Nikon, which started with military optical instruments, has also entered semiconductors, microscopic imaging instruments, and medical diagnostic equipment. However, the problem is that the scale of business is not large, and it is difficult to pick up the important task of leading the company. According to the 2017 fiscal year Nikon annual report, the imaging department still contributed more than 50% of the profits of Nikon, while the precision manufacturing sector contributed over 30% of the revenue, while Nikon's optical instruments and medical sectors did not perform well in the 2017 fiscal year.
What makes Nikon even worse is that the precision manufacturing department, second only to the imaging department, has also performed poorly in recent years. More than a decade ago, Nikon had topped global market share in the semiconductor manufacturing equipment business, which assembles a large number of optical technologies and is known as the exposure process. However, in recent years, the Dutch ASML has taken away market share and the business continues to lose money.
Judging from the current situation, Nikon will continue to cling to SLR in order to make better use of the business foundation accumulated in more than half a century in the downturn of the camera market. However, this may not be a good medicine for Nepal, but Nikon seems to be more and more like Kodak's bankruptcy in 2013. The latter is also historically famous, and even invented the first point-and-shoot camera and digital camera.
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