As often happens when a company struggles and starts downsizing, you tend to get an employee shift. That began happening at Nikon starting with the peak DSLR sales reached in the 2011-2012 time frame.
Quite a few of the middle to top managers and engineers I knew at Nikon at the start of the decade began to leave Nikon as volume decreased and the company started adjusting. Some simply retired, while some went to rival companies, mostly Fujifilm and Sony.
Initially this simply was downsizing via no rehiring, however late in the decade Nikon decided to bite the bullet and did an extensive, division-wide downsizing that lowered the Imaging group’s employee levels considerably. This led to Nikon’s Imaging engineering getting younger and more aggressive. While senior experience is still a thing respected at Nikon, I'd tend to say that the younger group is starting to dominate product decision making.
The question I have is this: does that group actually use the products they design and clearly see the customer, both current and future?
I don't have any real opinion on or answer to that question yet, as I don't see enough consistency of information to make a generalization. I will say that many of the new blood within the Imaging group I've encountered seem to want to move faster, but are currently frustrated in their ability to do so by outside forces as well as some inside management inertia.
Coupled with that, the supply chain is not something you can rely on at the moment to instantly produce something new, plus travel still has some restrictions on it that slows the ability to check out new suppliers, both for parts and technology.
Which brings us to the article’s headline.
I know that 2022 hasn’t been the year that Nikon Imaging expected it to be. Both new cameras and new lenses got delayed, for a variety of reasons. Production volumes were constrained on a lot of products, too. The good news is that what Nikon did sell was within their conservative forecast and produced good profit for the division in 2022 for the quarters already reported, and I think that will carry right through the last day of the year.
The dollar’s strength had Nikon (intentionally) moving a bit more product in the US, too, which helped the profit numbers. Still, overall, 2022 was a year of limited supplies, and thus limited sales. At one point or another virtually every Z camera and lens was out of a stock here in the US for at least a little bit. Some substantially so. A lot of that was due to delays that were enforced on Nikon, not delays they themselves were causing.
The problem with externally caused delays, such as the major problem of supply chain disruption, is that technology can put you out of sync and rhythm with the market. Canon, for instance, has a bit more control over their available sensors, as they fab their own and thus control everything but the supplies coming into the fab. Thus, the Canon R7 was quickly possible for them, as it was mostly some small adjustments to a sensor they were already producing.
Nikon, on the other hand, doesn't have a fab, so is dependent upon their external supplier relationships for sensors (primarily Sony Semiconductor). While Nikon is themselves a supplier to Sony Semi, Sony's fabs are basically at or above capacity at the moment, so pushing new chips through is a little more difficult at the moment if they weren't already in progress from a couple of years ago.
And so, while 2022 sales and profits have pleased Nikon management and the company’s investors, launching new products for customers wasn’t anything close to being on rapid fire: Nikon gave us one new camera and six new lenses in 2022. They also slowly managed to (mostly) dig out from under their Z9, 24-120mm, and much of the 100-400mm backlog.
Will 2023 be different? I believe it will be: multiple new cameras, another quiver of new lenses. Here’s my best guess: three new cameras and eight new lenses in 2023.
3 and 8 in 2023 sounds a lot better than the 1 and 6 of 2022, and who knows, Nikon might somehow manage more. But three new cameras and eight new lenses are my current expectations for 2023 in the Z System.
Plus Sigma and Tamron will both announce multiple new lenses for the Z mount in 2023.
