rick.lang wrote:I think the sales this year that coincide with the American Thanksgiving holiday in late November may be a record sales volume as companies try their best to recover sales volumes from the current downturn in sales related to the dramatic decrease in activity in the film and video sectors.
I don’t think that there are a lot of companies that can afford to maintain their current pricing until late November, especially companies whose sales depend on discretionary spending, which is most of the camera and camera accessory market. Our economies are experiencing serious economic damage. The number of people who have lost their jobs is staggering. Assuming that I’m typical of people who are reasonably comfortable financially, those people are thinking twice about spending money on things that they don’t actually need.
On Monday, DJI launched the Mavic Air 2 and hired just about every warm body on social media to do it. DJI is highly dominant in the drone market, and presumably flush, so maybe it can weather weak sales, but I won’t be surprised if we see discounting on the launch prices sooner rather than later. Of the camera makers, Leica is probably in the best position to weather this, but only because it’s a niche player with a relatively well-off clientele. Still, I suspect that the waitlist for the new SL2 is going to clear fairly quickly. I think that most camera makers, as well as accessory makers, are facing a choice, cut production and sales or cut margins, if not both.
If there’s light at the end of the tunnel by U.S. Thanksgiving, which interestingly will be just after the Presidential and Congressional elections, I agree that there could be healthy pre-Christmas sales volume in the U.S.