The smartphone is changing the landscape of the mobile industry. But, could it be killing digital cameras as well? Famous brands like Kodak and Canon try to survive and stay relevant amidst the smartphone camera era. The recent years have brought us smartphones like Blackberry and iPhone that significantly drawn down the sales for point and shoot cameras. Revenues slid from $2.4 billion in 2008 to just $1.9 billion presently.
The death of Flip, which placed Cisco beleaguered, is a result of unprecedented growth of iPhone and Android devices. Although smartphones can’t compete with Flip in terms of quality, it still faced extinction. To prevent themselves from going the way of the dinosaurs, Kodak and Canon have tried to revive and update their products, services and offerings to consumers.
Kodak is fresh from winning patent infringement case against Apple Inc. and has collected a sum of $550 million. They are also amassing $144 million from LG and Samsung for electronics dispute. Summing everything up, Kodak is looking at a $1 billion bundle after dust settles. To also keep their prices competitive, Kodak opts to utilize surcharges to cover for rising costs of raw materials like silver. Another famous name of digital cameras, Canon is looking at its supply chain to improve revenue, and expects $600 million profit from this segment. The company also signed a deal with Ubiqz to resell their products.
Note that digital cameras are the not the only segments that continue to fight for survival in this epoch—there are printers, too. However, for giants like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox, keeping the hardware business alive is about strategies. HP recently announced buy-back offers on LaserJet printers and will give cash rebate in place of old printers. Xerox, on the other hand, is expanding its business to Europe and Latin America to boost sales of ACS or Affiliated Computer Services, which they purchased for $6 billion. They also teamed up with Cisco for mobile printing in the cloud.
Smartphones are addictive, and their presence threatens even high-end cameras. Everyone will wait for the unending rounds of upgrades, gimmicks and updates from point and shoot cameras in order to stay alive.
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