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There's a brief article (in German language) in Austria's Der Standard with a couple numbers I hadn't heard before:

 

  • 75,000 cameras/year capacity from Wetzlar
  • 100,000 cameras/year from Japan

 

Seems to me a pretty fair short picture of Leica today.

 

Leica baut neues Werk für bis zu 75.000 Kameras - IT-Business - derStandard.at › Web

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Well "100 000" from "Japan" of a "basic model" at the price "about 800" Euro can only mean they count the whole Panasonic production, which has nothing at all to do with the original production of Leicas in Solms now and in Wetzlar in the future or in Portugal. The Panaleicas are sold with a red dot, but are not produced by Leica. Someone, who doesn't know much about Leica reading this article might ask himself, if they intend to produce 75.000 DSLR for 26.000 € at the new factory or why they invest a lot of money to reduce their capacity from more than 100.000 now to 75.000 in the future.

 

The whole article gives a maximum of desinformation with a minimum of lines.

 

BTW: I wonder wherefrom they took the information

that Leica stocks were taken off the exchange market in 2009; a short look at the Leica website might tell them that this was only in 2012 after a second try of a squeeze out.

Edited by UliWer
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It is a bit lame; it suggests 75.000 S cameras, as the M and X series are not mentioned at all. Nor the binoculars and scopes....

 

Must be wrong numbers for S. In a recent Forbes article Shultz from Leica mentions that the worldwide market for medium market digital cameras was 6000 units (all brands) a year. And how, in short 3 years since the S introduced Leica was able to capture 20% (1200/yr) of that market. 75,000 S cameras would be 60+ years worth of sales.

 

Here is the article:

How Leica Camera Is Reinventing The Medium-Format Market On Its Own Terms - Forbes

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aren't the M cameras all finally assembled in Portugal? or is that changing after the new Wetzlar factory opens?

 

I hope not. That factory has been shutdown for the summer.

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I think you're trying to parse a sloppy article as if it were a scholarly work. Most of you have probably not experienced seeing your words put into print after talking to a reporter. This reporter is talking to a very general audience and probably wouldn't be able to explain how a rangefinder model differs from an SLR. He's shooting for the very basics.

 

He mentions of the Japanese introductory models and the German top-of-the-line model; M and X fall out for lack of space or lack of interest, not stressing the writer's point of "Gee, this stuff is expensive."

 

But he got the numbers somewhere; he didn't just make them up. You can't apply the absence of M and X in the article and say that the author is suggesting that quantity of S cameras, and then toss out the whole article.

 

Take the useful data from this source along with that from other sources (like the Stephan Schulz interview in Forbes, which offers its own questionable assumptions).

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