Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/08/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]They need to broaden their market, get more people to buy their products. Most folks have gone to low cost production to widen market share through price. For Leica, they need to go the route of the luxury goods market to keep their cachet. Absolutely the best quality, and service. They need to revive their old program of refurbishing old cameras to new specs; just much faster turn around and far better communication. Why should the independents get all the business for recovering old cameras. What about repair of old rangefinders that have gone dim. You just can not depend on your old customers to buy five new lenses every year, especially when your new offerings aren't much superior to lenses from the sixties that we already own. The offerings through the nineties got many of us to upgrade to faster, sharper, less flare. For a 35 F2.5 I already have two Canon's, a Nikon, and a Leica or two. What would sell a few lenses? How about a new Noctilux? How about a new 24 at F2? If they come up with a full frame M9 then they will have another couple of good years as most of us relinquish our M8's to secondary status mostly due to high ISO performance issues. The new models from Nikon and Canon are phenomenal at 3200 to 6400 ISO. On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 4:37 AM, Didier Ludwig <leica@screengang.com> wrote: > Looks like Leica really needs to release new products at Photokina, as they > lost 38% in sales in the first 2008 quarter. > > The sales of the Panaleica compacts, which helped for a good 2007 result, > broke down, as it is to be expected in a market with such short product > lifecycles. Higher expenses in the research dept. reduced the income as > well > as the delay of several product launches. > > They hope that the products, which will be announced at photokina, will > help for better 2009/2010 sales. > > But when I see their rather thin financial bandwidth, I don't believe they > have the money to develop really revolutionary innovations. The competitors > will probably flood the photokina with new fullframe bodies and a lot of > new > fast primes and keep Leica dancing. > > http://tinyurl.com/5s753m (german article) > > Didier > > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > -- Don don.dory@gmail.com