As a brief follow up to Nasim’s latest post, this brief article shares some recent CIPA statistics regarding the shipment of mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras. Depending on how a person interprets this data will determine whether the mirrorless interchangeable camera market is ‘growing’.
As you can see in the graph above, if we look at global unit volume of shipments of mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras from 2012 through to 2016 the market has actually declined from 3.95 million units in 2012 to 3.15 million units in 2016. So, in absolute units the mirrorless market has not grown.
By comparison the unit shipments of DSLRs has declined much more rapidly than mirrorless. Since 2012 the number of DSLRs shipped has declined from 16.2 million units down to 8.45 million units in 2016.
Obviously if the mirrorless camera market has been declining at a much slower rate than the DSLR market, then the market share of mirrorless cameras has increased during this five year period. As you can see in the graph above, this has been the case with the share of mirrorless cameras going from 19.6% to 27.2% of the total interchangeable lens camera market.
Early signs with CIPA data for Jan-Feb 2017 points to an increase in the actual unit volume of the interchangeable lens camera market. However using only 2 months of data to assess a potential market trend is not a prudent thing to do as Nasim pointed out in his original article.
Article and graphs Copyright 2017 Thomas Stirr. All rights reserved. No use, adaptation or reproduction of any kind is allowed without written permission