Olympus can't blame smartphones - They lost money almost every year since 2009

[Andrew Reid]

JIP manager's next idea:

[BTM_Pix]

1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

 

JIP manager's next idea:

I hear they are planning to use the brand awareness to market bespoke package tours to visit large mountains in Greece.

[sanveer]

Remember the infamous Michael Woodford case, of him Exposing the over US$1.7 billion in scam money, involving fake auditing and sequestering money (euphemism for illegal wire transfers to Cayman Islands among other places), at Olympus. 

It appears, that Olympus probably never recovered from that, because when the scan was exposed, they had to isolated one of their 3 businesses. So it was probably prudent to let their Camera Imaging business bite the bullet.

Maybe Olympus was ust a sinking ship. It may have merely been a question of when. 

[Andrew Reid]

Michael Woodford had quite an Olympus Trip

[Robert Collins]

Olympus's camera division has been bleeding for years. To translate those yen figures into dollars - over the past 2 years imaging has lost US$270m dollars on US$800m of turnover. Rather remarkably this doesnt include corporate/central allocated costs that are a seperate line item (to the divisions) in the accounts.

Even more remarkably, if you go back and look at when the division reported a 'gross profit' you will find that the gross profit margin was around 50% (which is quite lot higher than Apple's). You really dont get a lot of camera for your money even when the company is losing US$300 on every US$1,000 you spend. When your SG&A expenses are running at over 50% of sales, you realize all those marketing costs add up pretty quickly....

[rawshooter]

The numbers pretty clearly tell that - no matter the actual pros and cons - you simply can't sell MFT as a system for stills photography only. It doesn't work now and, as we see here, never worked in the past. Especially not with comparatively expensive bodies and lenses, targeting enthusiast photographers. 

[Trek of Joy]

They pushed all their chips onto the table with overpriced smaller sensor cameras featuring limited video specs and inferior AF compared to the competition at a time when video capabilities and sophisticated AF tracking are really driving forces in the market - and lost. The availability of cheap APS-c cameras from CaNikon and FF bodies at the $2000 price squeezed them from both ends, and the fact imaging was bleeding cash every year proved that. Of course they were big in the compact space and that market disappearing really stung them as well. Its really not surprising. IMO the m43 group was also betting on Canon or Nikon getting into the mix and bringing its user base into the fold, but that never happened. The lack of sensor advancement didn't do them any favors either, most of the last decade was just a single 16 or 20 mp sensor, not breaking away from Sony was a fatal flaw. In the end sensor and premium pricing worked against them when you can get APS-c/FF bodies and lenses for the same price.

I've always wanted to see them make lenses for other mounts, I love Olympus' rendering. They could crush it as a third party lens manufacturer like Sigma.

Sad to see this happen. They probably won't be the last.

Chris

[noone]

I think the Olympus flagship OM1 cameras  would have been great with an APSC sensor.

Oh well, some great bargains will soon be available.

[rawshooter]

It's really a pity that Olympus threw decades of its expertise in making compact and optically brilliant FF lenses out of the window when they switched from analog to digital. I agree that they could have had a brilliant future as an all-systems lens maker (instead of a single-system camera maker).

Manual focus OM lenses are still among the best vintage lenses you can buy and adapt to your camera, since their optical formulas were optimized for compact size, low contrast (=high DR) and high resolution.

It's a f*ing disgrace for the legacy of Yoshihisa Maitani, Olympus' genius camera and lens designer (who created the original analog Pen/Pen F system, the original 35mm OM system, the fantastic Olympus compact rangefinder cameras and the brilliant Olympus XA).

[Andrew Reid]

Yes it is a disgrace.

But that's often what happens when sales, accountancy and marketing department staff are expedited to the top of the camera over the heads of senior engineers.

[Marcio Kabke Pinheiro]

21 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

Yes it is a disgrace.

But that's often what happens when sales, accountancy and marketing department staff are expedited to the top of the camera over the heads of senior engineers.

I think that engeneering have it's blame too. Looks like a Japanese thing - they adopt a development path and don't have the pride to accept when the path was wrong.

For example, at Olympus:
- I could navigate pretty well in their menus because of practice, but they are atrocious. SCP make is a little better, but the menus per se are very illogical. There where huge problems with MySets too, at least in the past - when I've contacted them about why some settings are not recording in a MySet (E_M10 MK I times), they said that allowing these settings could potentially set the camera in a infinite loop lock...
- For YEARS their spot metering center only - Pansonic had it in the same spot of AF point for years. Only in Pen F they've implemented the ability to change it - but is STILL center only in the (more recent) E-M10 MK III...
- Still have fixed "pages" for LCD / EVF layouts - you could not have level gauges and histogram on the same screen...

- Sitl could not engage peaking + focus assist with a single button press - you need two buttons to do it.
- Stubborn strange places to put the power lever;

And the list goes on. Other Japanese makers have the same behaviour; Panasonic stuborn to implement IBIS, saying that "OIS is superior" (Canon was the same until now), only to discover that making IBIS work in conjunction to their OIS was actually a SELLING point; Panasonic limiting some cameras to 10-50 mins of 4k; Sony with their menus and color science...

[fuzzynormal]

4 hours ago, Márcio Kabke Pinheiro said:

they said that allowing these settings could potentially set the camera in a infinite loop lock.

Yowza.  Seems like a dive into the code and firmware updating would fix that.  Too much trouble?  I always wondered why this persisted.

And, yeah, Japanese culture is cool and frustrating at the same time.  Japanese business culture is all that amplified to 11.

[fuzzynormal]

On 6/28/2020 at 8:22 AM, rawshooter said:

you simply can't sell MFT as a system for stills photography only. It doesn't work now and, as we see here, never worked in the past.

I really don't get this argument.  Limitation in one aspect of photography, such as sensor size, might not be a hinderance if it allows a superior option in another, such as compact gear and IBIS.

Certainly not all photographers want the same thing.  I'm a videographer that's attracted to small gear for the ease of use.  I have to imagine photographers are into that convenience as well.  Maybe not at the levels required to be market successful, if that's what you mean.

[Video Hummus]

Yeah its bullshit. Lots of great photography out there from MFT users. Not everyone is a wedding shooter or a portrait only shooter. MFT is perhaps one of the best for landscapes and wildlife and nature photography. Lighter capable kit. With balanced (keyword there) performance. Olympus’ HHHR and 80MP tripods modes were excellent landscape photography tools. You could even use HHHR for portraits. You could use 80MP tripod Mode for product photography. It’s a great, balanced system that gets shit on all the time for no apparent reason other than to boost peoples egos? Not sure...don’t care anymore really to try and understand why the need for it. Maybe if we were more focused on the results and less about the gear it wouldn’t be this way and this thread wouldn’t have 100 posts about why MFT sucks with the same repeated subjective bullshit. Stupid waste of time. Go create something, like this dude (shot on the craptastic GH5 btw with its tiny shitty sensor):

 

[Super8]

Olympus and most camera companies are missing the "Steve Jobs" visionary that drives creative and innovation. 

Currently Sony seems to have the guts, creative and know survival depends on having innovative ideas.  Sony has been pushing electronic and making great products for decades. 

Can know what people want but has yet to deliver a great product that pushes them to #1 in mirror less sales.

You can always put lipstick on a pig with great marketing. 

Looks like July might be some positive news in a depressing 2020.

 

[rawshooter]

8 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

I really don't get this argument.  Limitation in one aspect of photography, such as sensor size, might not be a hinderance if it allows a superior option in another, such as compact gear and IBIS.

Certainly not all photographers want the same thing.  I'm a videographer that's attracted to small gear for the ease of use.  I have to imagine photographers are into that convenience as well.  Maybe not at the levels required to be market successful, if that's what you mean.

You didn't carefully read my posting and quoted only a part of it. It was not - as I explicitly wrote - making an argument for or against MFT as a stills photography system.  

To rephrase: We all can have our own opinions on MFT and, from our experience and knowledge, bring up all kinds of good arguments for its merits and place as a photography system. But the market decided otherwise. 

The numbers posted by Andrew clearly tell that since its introduction, MFT has never been profitable for Olympus.  The company was the only MFT manufacturer that sold MFT as primarily an enthusiast (and even high-end) stills photography system - as opposed to Panasonic, DJI, Blackmagic who sell it as a hybrid or video-only system, and as opposed to other manufacturers who sell APS-C and full frame cameras in the same price range as Olympus' bodies.

Which leads to the conclusion that  MFT failed on the market as a specialized system for enthusiast stills photography.

After the megapixel race came the sensor size race. Our opinion is irrelevant if the vast majority of people base their buying decisions on these criteria - and if that creates casualties in a dramatically shrinking market.