A piece of history died today: Olympus officially sells it’s camera business to JIP
This is likely one of the worse news ever for the camera industry. And I fear this isn’t the last company to fall in the years to come. Olympus announced it sold the camera business to JIP. And now, JIP is not likely to keep MFT alive. As reported by our reader Mistral:
Japan Industrial Partners (JIP) are a Japanese private equity fund specializing in restructuring / turnaround situations. They buy loss-making businesses, strive to make them profitable and, once done, resell them to corporate acquirers.
To give an example: they bought Sony’s PC business (Vaio).
In short this is what’s likely to happen: Layoffs of personnel, killing of future products launches (from 2021) and sale of technologies to the best offer.
And I feel Olympus is just the first company that will kill it’s Imaging Division. In the short term Pentax may be next. In the long term also some bigger companies may stop making cameras.