A look at the rise and fall of the camera industry in a single graph

By now, it's widely understood that the camera and photo equipment industry has gone through a huge period of flux in the last decade.

According to CIPA, which is a Japan-based industry group that includes the majority of the major players such as Sony, Canon, OM Digital Solutions (formerly Olympus), Fujifilm and Nikon, worldwide camera shipments dropped by 94 percent between 2010 and 2023, wiping out decades of growth.

The reasons for the steep decline are well documented - it's been driven by a massive decline in sales of cameras with in-built lenses, the type of travel-friendly camera that was commonplace until smartphones became the go-to photography tool for most people. 

Published by Statista, this graph below contextualises the data, and looks at worldwide shipments of photo cameras as logged by CIPA since 1951. It shows sales began to climb in the early 1980s, before peaking around 2010, and then beginning a dramatic decline.

The main culprit is clearly the smartphone - the first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2007.

According to CIPA, 109 million cameras with in-built lenses were shipped at their peak in 2010, while in 2023, CIPA members shipped just 1.7 million.

It's not all bad news though - the latest industry figures from CIPA have revealed that more cameras were shipped between January and May 2024 than during the same periods in 2022 and 2023.