Taiwanese digital camera makers will only have a lukewarm 15-percent growth in shipments this year from last year due to a slower increase in global shipments, ascribed in part to competition from camera phones, a private research house said yesterday.
In line with the weaker demand, local digital camera makers are expected to ship about 19.7 million units this year from 17.2 million units last year, Simon Yang (楊勝帆), an analyst at the Topology Research Institute (TRI, 拓墣產業研究所), said at an investment seminar yesterday in Taipei.
The institute predicts the global shipments of digital cameras to rise to 53.5 million units this year, an increase of 20 percent from an estimated 44.6 million units last year.
But camera-equipped phones will squeeze the low-end digital camera market at an annual pace of about 5 million units this year as the devices have started to catch on in Europe and North America, Yang warned.
"We already saw similar replacement happening last year in Japan," Yang said. Some 40 percent of 1-megapixel digital cameras were replaced by high-resolution camera phones by late last year, he added.
Worldwide camera phone shipments are expected to jump by 53.2 percent at composite average growth rate to reach 366 million units in 2008, the international research agency In-Stat/MDR said in a report last September.
In addition to the growing popularity of camera phones, Tai-wanese digital camera makers also face a challenge posed by Sanyo Electric Co, Yang said.
The leading Japanese digital camera maker said last month that it planned to boost its capacity by two-thirds to 20 million units a year.
"The additional 8 million unit expansion will outpace the 3 million units local companies shipped to Japanese vendors last year and leave less room for local companies to receive orders from Japanese brands," Yang said.
But a consumer electronics analyst at Polaris Securities Group (
"I don't think Sanyo's expansion plan will have any negative impact on Taiwanese companies; instead it is more likely to provide an opportunity for local companies," said Helen Chen (
Premier Image Technology Corp (普立爾), Taiwan's largest digital camera maker, has a good chance to win orders from the Japanese company as the expansion will not be able to catch demand and the maintain cost effectiveness, she said.
Premier is expected to outpace its local rivals by posting growth of about 33 percent in shipments this year, to around 6 million units from 4.5 million last year, Chen said.
Japanese digital camera makers outsourced approximately 10 percent of their production to Tai-wanese manufacturers last year, according to the TRI's research.
Chen said she did not foresee quick replacement of camera phones as most international handset makers expect to unveil new models with 1.5-megapixels late this year.
Motorola Inc, the world's No2. mobile phone maker, said it planned on pitching 20 to 30 new models into the local market this year, all of them equipped with cameras, but handsets with 1 megapixel cameras will not be launched until the end of the year.
Three-megapixel digital cameras have taken over from 2-megapixel models as the most commonly sold camera type last year. TRI predicted 4-megapixel cameras will gradually take 3-megapixel digital camera's position this year.
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