About the time when Minolta abandoned the professional market, the Harvard Business School published a case study about a similar business decision by the Hanson ski boot company. What they forgot is that most consumers like to buy less expensive models of renowned brands, and renown in the camera business comes from professional usage. The company’s executives decided that abandoning the professional market and focusing on the consumer market would be much more lucrative. Minolta sold 100 times as many consumer camera than professional cameras and made a much larger profit margin on each consumer camera than it did on each professional camera. However, Minolta made a strategic business error between 19 when it abandoned manufacturing cameras for professional photographers. Though the Hasselblad camera company is proud that its medium-format cameras were carried by astronauts in the Gemini and Apollo space missions, Minoltas were the first cameras American astronauts carried into space, during the Mercury missions of the early 1960s. From my UPI days long ago, I knew many Vietnam War photojournalists who carried Minolta SR-7s or SRT-101s. Long ago, the major brands of 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras for professionals photographers were Nikon, Canon, and Minolta, in that order.
But news today that Konica Minolta will abandon the manufacture all types of cameras, selling its camera division to Sony, surprised and saddened me. Or that film and photographic paper manufacturers Ilford and Agfa had each gone bankrupt. Last week, I wasn’t surprised to hear that Nikon abandoned the manufacture of film cameras (though Nikon will continue to make its flagship F6 film camera for professional photographers) and will instead manufacture only digital cameras.
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