Herb wrote:
in total camera sales, Pentax has been hovering around 3% market share for nearly a decade. the camera division lost money for a couple of years before rebounding for 2003, but the most optimistic forecast by Pentax shows market share holding nearly constant. the only places where Pentax is forecasting market share increases is in dual purpose DVD/CD lens components where Pentax is around 30% or so of the total, and endoscopes, where Pentax is about 15% of the total. Pentax hopes to grow to 40% and 20% respectively, but no-one seems to believe them. people expect Pentax to be able to come close to meeting its sales target of 2.3 million digital cameras for 2004 but to be unable to grow much beyond 3M after that. total film camera sales of all types are expected to drop to under 200K units by the end of next year. REPLY: I believe these numbers are wrong or at least put in the wrong context. The 3% market share is Pentax market share in digital cameras from last year, not total camera market share. Their prospect is to increase this to 5% within a year or two. The film camera sales below 200 000 is for slr's, not camera of all types. Even one time use cameras sell millions a year still. Over 1 000 000 DSLR's a year and 200 000 film slr's by the end of the year seem about right though. Pål
