Nikon will raise camera prices on the back of tariffs
The Japanese brand’s sales are way down from their early 2010s peak.
Japanese camera and chipmaking equipment company Nikon plans to introduce “a necessary price adjustment for products” that will kick in on June 23, as tariffs — or their ever-looming threat — continue to rock the world of consumer technology.
It’s not clear which models will get caught up in the price hikes, but, as The Verge observed, now might be a good opportunity for photographers to snap up any Nikon cameras they’d had eyes on.
Though higher prices could help offset the 10 billion yen (~$70 million) drop in operating profit that Nikon outlined for the year ahead, zooming out on the tech giant’s financials provides a pretty clear picture of a company past its peak.
Shutterbugged
As we’ve charted before, smartphones pretty much crushed the entire digital camera industry. While there have been rare bright spots in the industry like Fujifilm, whose faux vintage devices have helped win scores of fans eager to bask in nostalgia, the digital decline has hurt other players.
In its last fiscal year, Nikon posted revenues of 715 billion yen, significantly down from its 1.01 trillion yen peak. Now, the 108-year-old company is trying to expand beyond its camera and chipmaking tech businesses, having been a world leader in lithography equipment — used to make semiconductors — in the 1980s and ’90s before losing market share to ASML in the 2000s. Those divisions still make up the vast majority of its sales, though: last year, cameras and lenses accounted for almost 42% of Nikon revenues, while its precision equipment business made up 28%.
