Olympus is selling the camera part of it’s business.

[laingjd]

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/2...ision-jip-vaio

[Edmunds]

A sad day indeed, but not entirely unexpected!

I wonder what's gonna come next, JIP will want to make money, but this is not an easy market to make money in. I wonder what their future strategy will be.

[OldRadioGuy]

Japan Industrial Partners is a private equity firm. These entities tend to buy companies in financial difficulty, cut costs by firing people and extract as much cash as possible from the physical assets. They are not in the business of R&D.

Here are additional details from another perspective: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/64075472

Bob

[Edmunds]

But they are in the business of turning around companies (financially) and selling them to others.

Hell, even Pentax found a buyer. Olympus is way bigger, and while the marketplace is saturated, there is still a lot of money to be made.


My thoughts:

1) We're not going to see revolutionary new features in new cameras. Not that I actually use them much. But we are going to see new cameras, because supporting the lens mount will continue to be profitable.

2) A lot of markets won't see official Olympus product releases. They will have to be grey imports.

3) Lens development will be outsourced. TBH, we don't know how much of it is already outsourced. When know most of the f/1.2 primes, as well as others, are already actually Sigma lenses.

4) Consolidated camera and lens lineup

[laingjd]

Don’t take this the wrong way but dpreview is really low on the list of perspectives.