This week, Canon released its financials for the first quarter of 2024. While the company’s sales increased for the year, its operating profit was down for the first time in four years.
Canon’s income from imaging, which includes both networked cameras and regular cameras, showed a significant drop in sales, according to the published results.
Cameras, which includes both compact and interchangeable lens cameras, saw a 7 percent drop in net sales, while network cameras saw an even bigger decrease at 11 percent.
Despite this notable loss, Canon is still projecting a 3.6 percent growth in sales for the entire year.
Canon says: "In the Imaging Business Unit, although sales of mirrorless cameras remained solid centered around new products including entry-level EOS R50, sales of interchangeable-lens digital cameras as a whole decreased compared with the same period of the previous year due to an increase in sales promotion expenses and decrease in shipment volume aimed at adjusting the inventory that accumulated in the market at the end of the previous year."
Canon’s unit sales also took a hit in the first quarter of this year, down 500,000 units at a reduction rate of 10 percent. However, Canon is still projecting 2.8 million unit sales for the entire 12 months of 2024. This is still a projected reduction of 3 percent in overall unit sales compared to 2023.
Shedding some light on the situation, Canon Rumors suggests that the first three months of the calendar year are always tricky to predict due to stats and figures being impacted by the hangover from Black Friday and Christmas consumer habits.
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“If retailers haven't sold all their Christmas inventory, then they aren't ordering new inventory,” they reported. Then we have the post-COVID bounce in 2023 and how that may affect year-on-year results. In other words, Canon isn't doomed.”
Despite their (hopefully) temporary financial losses, our editor James Artaius believes that currently Canon’s best overall camera is the Canon EOS R5.
“In my opinion, the best Canon camera overall is the mighty Canon EOS R5,” he wrote, “It's a camera I personally bought because there is simply nothing it can't do, between its 45MP sensor (capable of shooting up to 400MP images!), 8K video, 20fps bursts and weather sealing. It was so far ahead of its time that it's still a technological marvel – but because it was released back in 2020, there are some great deals on it.”
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