Swiss Foto intern reports an interesting organizational restructuring
at Minolta, which somehow could be typical for the camera business:
To face the digital cameras becomming the most important camera
market in 2001, Minolta relocates their development and production
facilities. In future, digital camera development will be the
only work done in Japan. To have enough capacities there, major SLR
activities will be concentrated in Malaysia. Malaysia in contrast
will give the compact camera activities to Schanghai in China.
Shanghai will cover the worldwide compact camera segment including
development in future.
I think this is rather typical for the market going on now. 35mm
compacts are under enormous price pressure with minimal margins. They
can only be made at low cost places anymore. Japan in contrast is a
very expensive place for camera activities meanwhile, only products
with very large margins can be done there, and you can earn a lot of
money with digital cameras at the moment, due to the current high
price levels. SLRs are somewhere inbetween, but they are already at
the state of yesterdays compact cameras.
If Pentax produces the MZ-S in Japan, they will be pretty brave...
Ralf
-
This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe,
go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to
visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
