Fujifilm Yearly Financials

"A decline in overall demand for compact digital cameras caused revenue to decrease…" 

To wit: sales declined 23.8% in the digital camera business for Fujifilm compared to the prior year, but what's a quarter of a billion dollars between friends, right? 

Fujifilm is very careful to not break out the profit/loss for the camera business. Instead, they mask that by lumping it together with film and photographic paper, which had improving profitability "reflecting the strong sales…and measures to reduce costs." Oh, gee, they didn't mention that they raised prices on film twice, did they? (They did mention that a competitor stopped making some film products they still sell ;~).

When lumped together, the film and digital camera business lost less money than last year, but it still lost 2.2 billion yen (US$23 million at today's rate). 

Also this note: "The decline in demand for compact digital cameras continued to get worse after [the last quarter of calendar 2012]." Despite that, they're claiming the coming year will result in "great improvement in profitability [for digital cameras]." How do they achieve this? Reinforce sales of high-end models and interchangeable lens systems (e.g. the XF mount cameras), focus on differentiated products and reducing number of models, and reducing fixed costs. However, note that when Fujifilm says profitability will go up, they may mean that losses may be lower, not that they actually achieve a profit. 

Personally, I'm doubtful. But it doesn't really make any difference. Total sales of cameras at Fujifilm were 91.8 billion yen (US$1 billion). But that represents a mere 4% of Fujifilm's overall corporate sales. Amazingly, they could have given away all those cameras they made and still be profitable as a company. 

The main thing readers of this site want to know is whether the X-Pro1 and XE-1 are here to stay. Yes, they are. They may be one of the few things left in Fujifilm's camera group by the time all the dust settles, though.

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