If you know how to read tea leaves, you'll know that Nikon is now obsessed with China (and to a smaller degree, India and other SE Asian countries). The reason? Growth.
I posited earlier on this site that Nikon needed a strong growth plan because overall camera sales were flattening. Well, they have one, and it's China. Simply put, Nikon will continue to just do what they've done in the past, but with an emphasis on getting cameras and lenses into the hands of the Chinese, who aren't yet market saturated with cameras. And those cameras are highly likely to be mostly Coolpix and low-end DSLRs.
Evidence is present in many places, so let's catch you up on some other sources of information. First, consider China Daily's headline last March: "Canon says China may become top camera market in 2015." Simply put, the expected unit volume growth in China should exceed the unit volume growth in the US or Europe, the two traditional "big markets." Eventually this means more sales in China than the US. This is an increasingly common bet amongst global companies: everyone sees China's unrelenting GDP growth during the last recession as a clue that China is ready to supplant the US as the driver of the world economy.
I have a couple of problems with that viewpoint. The first is that China has artificially boosted their GDP to the point that there's almost certainly a few bubbles in their economy now. Bubbles eventually pop and bring things back down to their reality. This isn't to deny that consumerism hasn't risen at a fast rate in China, only that there are questions about both sustainability as well as where the real growth in GDP is being put. On the flip side, it's clear that consumers in China are buying things they didn't only ten years ago, and the overall demand is certainly there for things like electronic goods, and specifically cameras.
However, I think that most companies are underreading the US economy. While we're in no way out of the woods from the last recession yet, the primary problem in the US is not demand, it's jobs. If you've been paying attention, you'll note that for the Fortune 500 companies in the US, quarterly profits just hit their highest level since just after World War II. That indicates that companies have pared to the bone, probably overreacting to the recession itself, which admittedly, was a very scary one. The US really only needs two things to happen to ramp up some very scary growth curves of its own again: get past the mortgage mess with real estate markets at realistic levels, and create more jobs.
But let's assume for a moment that China is the future for cameras and Nikon. What kind of cameras? There, the answer is interesting: compact and mirrorless, I think. I expect China to mirror the Japanese market in terms of camera purchasing, not mirror the US. In the US we seem to embrace the "more is better" philosophy in our camera purchases. While things are changing here, if you go to a US National Park this holiday weekend, you'll see a lot of big body cameras at every photo opportunity. In Japan, not so much. More like camera phones, compacts, and mirrorless these days (mirrorless is over 20% of the interchangeable lens camera market now in Japan). Small is beautiful in Japan, and I think that same thing will play in China, though mirrorless cameras will have to come down in price to make the real inroads I expect.
Thus, in the Q&A from the recent Nikon Medium Term Management Plan we get a statement that needs some parsing: "Although we considered a variety of so-called mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras for the digital SLR camera market, we discern the appropriate timing for the launch of our new-generation digital cameras based on the direction of the market demand."
As opaque as Japanese business-speak sometimes can be, if you go back to the original Japanese and look at the other clues, that statement appears to say to me "we have a mirrorless camera ready, and we're likely not to launch it until we have better marketing and sales functions in place in China."
What? How'd I get B from A? Like I said, you have to learn to read business Japanese, both in actual content and in intent. There's a consistency to Nikon's comments, statements, and answers lately. Note that up higher in the Q&A is this: "...contribution from Asia to total sales will continue to rise in the future...plans for business expansion [by Nikon in Asia] have not all been efficient." What that essentially says is that Nikon need to put in place a better, more cohesive, more visible sales effort in China. ASAP.
I think we'll see Nikon China subsidiary news almost simultaneously with any new low-end DSLR or mirrorless products. In fact, I'd say that they probably shouldn't announce a mirrorless camera before they have the Nikon China subsidiary ready to execute big. And let me go even one step further: I'll be that such a camera will be made in China, too.
That leaves one other thing to parse in Nikon's recent statements: "We are committed to further improving our marketing capabilities by building on best practice examples from the past on a global scale." The key words there are "from the past" and "global scale." If I read the context right, those words should actually be "from Nikon's past" and the "global scale" means replicating successess in the US and Europe in China.
But the big news is this: Nikon thinks they know how they'll grow as a company: more sales in China and SE Asia. The question of course then becomes: can they keep their existing large customer bases happy while doing that? Hard to say since the details are not yet visible. However, I do know one thing about American consumers: they don't like it if they think that they're playing second fiddle. American's embrace foreign products (and far too much so for our own fiscal good), but they also tend to abandon brands that don't play to their ego. Nikon still needs to solve a lot of problems Nikon users in the US keep facing: chronic inventory shortages, foolhardy gray market policies, chronic quality control issues, and more. So I'm all for Nikon getting growth out of Asian markets, but we still need "best practices" here in the US.