Canon, Nikon want 'friendly rivalry' to spur camera market

Canon Inc. and Nikon Corp. want to move their digital single-lens reflex camera businesses onto a path of higher sustained growth through friendly rivalry, despite their neck-and-neck race for No. 1 in the world ahead of next year's Beijing Olympics, the companies' presidents said in recent interviews.

"Technology will not improve if there is only one leading company," Canon President Tsuneji Uchida said at the company's Tokyo head office Dec. 14.

Nikon President Michio Kariya said in a separate interview Dec. 13 his Tokyo-based company has no intention of competing head-on with Canon in the fast-growing global market for digital SLR cameras.

Noting that the corporate size of Nikon is much smaller than Canon's, Kariya said his company thinks it is important to offer new types of cameras to consumers when its chief rival does not, instead of waging battles with similarly priced products around the same time.

As a matter of course, new models should be high quality, he said, but added that "an unnecessary fight (against Canon) would be fruitless" for the industry's future development.

Nikon is poised to secure the largest share of Japan's digital SLR camera market for the first time this year after its D40 entry-level model, launched last December, became a blockbuster, while Canon put most of its efforts into attracting midlevel users.

Between January and November, Nikon won a market share of 43.3 percent, followed by Canon with 39.9 percent and Pentax Corp. with 6.3 percent, according to market researcher BCN Inc.

Still, a Canon spokesman said the company, which is also a leading maker of copiers and printers, is confident of securing the top spot on a worldwide basis.

The company is trying to sell 25 million digital cameras around the world, of which 3.2 million are SLR types, in the business year through the end of December.

Uchida, who had a long career in Canon's camera development section before assuming his current post in 2006, said its digital camera sales are roughly in line with this target.

Kariya said Nikon's global sales of digital cameras are expected to be better than its initial goal.

Nikon's total target for this business year through March 31 has been set at 11 million units, of which 3 million are SLR cameras.

The presidents said their firms, which have a combined share of about 80 percent of the global digital SLR camera market, have enjoyed strong sales during the Christmas shopping season in the United States, despite lingering anxiety over the subprime mortgage crisis.

They also said how the Chinese market shakes out holds one of the most important keys to the success of their operations.

As for the Summer Olympics in Beijing, Kariya said an increasing number of photojournalists are beginning to switch back from Canon to Nikon as its D3 professional model has been getting favorable responses from them since its launch in November.

Canon's Uchida also said, "Many Nikon cameras will likely mix with ours at the Beijing Olympics."

But when it comes to the prospects of consumer spending in China outside the stadiums, the two presidents' views differ slightly, with Uchida being more optimistic than Kariya, saying the Chinese economy will strongly expand at least until around 2010, when Shanghai will hold a World Expo.

On how to keep up with growing demand for digital cameras, Kariya said Nikon is planning to raise output capacity at its plant in Thailand.

"At one point, there was discussion that we need to set up a new plant," he said. "But our Thai plant's productivity has been growing very fast in recent months.

"We believe there is still room for the plant to raise its output from the current monthly volume of 300,000 digital SLR cameras and 300,000 lenses."

For the future, Kariya said Nikon, which marked its 90th anniversary this year, will also consider whether it can strengthen its production capacity in Japan.

The Thai plant, with about 14,000 employees, is producing almost all of Nikon's digital SLR cameras, excluding the flagship D3 model.

In contrast, Canon is manufacturing all of its digital SLR models in Japan and Uchida said it has no plans to produce them abroad.

"I think it would be better not to take digital SLR cameras outside Japan" as the company now has a wide range of models and could save a great deal of time in designing and marketing new products if they are produced at home, he said.

On Canon's plan to enter the TV manufacturing industry, Uchida said the commercialization of surface-conduction electron-emitter display televisions is above everything else.

"We believe it will take a good amount of time for large displays to use organic light-emitting diode technology," he said. "For use in televisions, it will also be quite a long time."