Sony now has 40% of the US Full Frame market share!

Image courtesy SonyMirrorlessPro. Source: The NPD Group, Inc., U.S. Retail Tracking Service, Detachable Lens Camera, Sensor Size: Full Frame, Based on Dollars Share, Jan.- Jun. 2018.

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SonyMirrorlessPro added an additional detail about the Sony Full Frame market share in firts half 2018. The NPD group market anlysis shows Sony owns 40% of the market while Canon follows with 33% and Nikon with 26%.

They also added this interesting note about Nikon:

It’s also important because—well look at that market share position over Nikon. That’s 14% more dollar share than Nikon in a year when Nikon has delivered their highest-demand product in years, the Nikon D850.

This helps put the new Nikon mirrorless camera into context as well. Nikon owns 26% of the market share, so to move up to the number two spot they’d need to capture eight percent more of the share going forwardsfrom the other two companieswho are both competing against Nikon.

So, if Nikon only sells their mirrorless camera to existing Nikon customers, they’ll be competing against their own market share. That’s called “market cannibalization” which is the effect that a new product has on existing product sales. They’d simply be trading the sales of DSLRs for the sales of mirrorless cameras. As it stands now, Sony need only pull away more Nikon customers that are dissatisfied with the new mirrorless ecosystem than Nikon pulls away Sony customers, and that gap is going to be impossible to bridge.