As expected, Nikon's first half year results announced today showed strong gains in sales (22%) and income (375%) over the first half of last year.
The Imaging division sold 2.73 million DSLRs (1.9m a year ago), 3.93 million lenses (2.95m a year ago), and 7.86m Coolpix (6.7m a year ago). Sales were up 15% and income 76% in the group.
The big news was that Nikon expects to restart DSLR production in December at alternative facilities and hopes to gradually begin restoring the flooded Thailand facility to operation in January (full scale production in March). The net negative impact on sales of the Thailand flooding is expected to be US$833 million. Given this and other factors, Nikon has revised downward their full fiscal year estimates. Instead of 5.4m DSLRs/ILCs, they predict they'll sell 4.7m for the full year (that's still up from last year by almost 10%, and represents 31% of the market). Lenses also take a hit, with the new estimate 6.7m instead of 7.6m, probably because a lot of those are DX lenses made in Thailand. Meanwhile, Coolpix production, which wasn't impacted by the flooding is expected to hit 16m for the year, an 8% increase in a market that shrinks 7% during the year.
Overall, Nikon said they did not expect to get back to "full" DSLR production until April 2012.
We can now make better guesses via the figures Nikon presented as to just how integral the DSLR sales were to the unit and how they thought they were going to reach their stated goals in market share. With the Nikon 1 added into the "DSLR" numbers now, we see a slip from mid-30 percent market share to low-30 percents during the Thailand factory downtime. The numbers are a little murky, but it appears that Nikon was targeting the Nikon 1 to take up about 15% of their "DSLR" unit sales without cannibalizing them (e.g., adding the Nikon 1 would boost unit volume by 15% or so).
Meanwhile, news out of other camera companies is not so good. Panasonic is still losing money on cameras (though just how much and how is unclear from the numbers they released). Sony doesn't break out a lot of numbers from cameras, but one that they did, compact cameras, shows just how well Nikon is actually doing. Sony is predicting compact sales dropping 4% to 23m units while Nikon is predicting compact sales increasing 8% to 16m units (in an overall market of 100m units). Sony is also hedging currency at a different rate than Nikon in the coming six months: 77 yen instead of Nikon's 75 yen to the dollar, which seems risky (today the yen is at 78 to the dollar).
As if that weren't enough, Kodak is now saying that unless they sell their patent portfolio or get additional loans, they may not have enough cash to continue business going forward.