> Pentax announced yesterday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange newswire that it was > trying to reduce domestic headcount by 150 people with retirement incentives > for employees between 46 and 59.5 years of age. most of the people targeted > for early retirement are adminstrative staff. no other details available that > i can find.
Hello folks, Price collapse of compact digicams is now forcing Camera makers scrumble to sustain the competitiveness in various ways. An industry newspaper article said this month that there are only two ways to do it, one is to restructure themselves and another to bring out new models. Some excerpts; <<<<<<<Most severely hit was Olympus, who has been suffering from the sea of dead stock. Digicam biz suffered from over $200M loss, ended up with over $100M loss as the whole group in the last quarter ending the last March. Konica-Minolta reflect that the announcement of their SLR was too late (everybody knew :-). Because of the slump of the sales of compact digicam, their camera biz suffered over $80M loss last year. Pentax spent too much investment in the compact digicam with negative returns and ended up with $16M loss last year. Nikon/Canon sustained the thin profit by pushing high end DSLRs, while Panasonic and Casio retained the profit by offering unique and high end compact digicam. Olympus reduced their work force mainly in Chinese factories by over 4000 people, and consolidated 3 Japan domestic factories into one. K/M are going to cut several hundred people while Pentax 300 people globally. They all are going to concentrate on SLRs that have more profit margins. K/M are going to offer a popular priced DSLR model within this year (around $1,000 range), Olympus adding similarly popular priced model this fall with Pentax adding higher end models one after another next year. There will be a lot of optimization in the offering of compact digicams. Pentax are going to narrow it down to 3 models or so, and K/M will concentrate on their ultra thin models, all in an effort to increase the profitability. Each company will emphasize their own unique technologies such as "anti-shake" by K/M.>>>>>>>>> As camera makers sharpen their marketing strategies, it's going to be interesting in the next several months :-). Cheers, Ken
