Japanese Camera Makers Battle Smartphone Onslaught

Audience members snap photos with smartphones at a recent Tokyo fashion show, a far cry from what was needed to photograph memories just a few decades earlier. The tech change has rocked Japanese camera giants.

Keith Tsuji, Getty Images; inset: Graham Wood, Getty Images

TOKYO — High school student Nao Noguchi is a perfect illustration of why Japanese camera sales have plunged the past few years: She uses her smartphone for everything and cannot understand why anyone would bother with a separate device for photos.

"It is easy to take your smartphone out of your pocket if you want to take a picture of someone or something," the 17-year-old said during a day trip with a friend to the city's historic Asakusa district. "And you can send the pictures to friends quickly" on social media.

The selfie-stick toting pals are the camera industry's worst nightmare.

A rapid shift to smartphones has torn into a camera sector dominated by Japanese firms including Canon, Olympus, Sony and Nikon — much like digital cameras all but destroyed the market for photographic film years ago. And the numbers paint a grim picture: 130 million cameras were sold globally in 2011. Four years later, that figure stood at just 47 million.

The collapse was underscored this month as the firms published their latest financial results, with weak sales threatening a once-vibrant sector. Now companies are having to scramble for a response, hitting back with upmarket options and offering web-friendly features — or in some cases just moving away from the hard-hit business.

While Apple and Samsung recently pointed to slowing sales of smartphones, they have proved a mighty rival, offering an all-in-one phone, computer and camera with comparatively high-quality pictures and Internet photo downloading. The answer, the camera industry says, is to innovate and convince smartphone users to climb up the quality ladder.

"It's kind of life insurance for the camera industry to always protect this superiority in terms of picture quality," said Heribert Tippenhauer, an analyst at market research firm GfK. "The competition from smartphones has almost killed the cheapest cameras, but at the same time so many people are taking photos, as never before in human history. 

"The smartphone is the first step into the topic of photography, then people want to upgrade, the potential is there."

Source: Japanese Camera Makers Battle Smartphone Onslaught