What Happened To Olympus?

I posted last week about the news that Olympus was selling off its camera division, ending 101 years of being a major camera manufacturer. Now the British magazine, Amateur Photographer, has looked at the history of Olympus and what led up to this decision. It's clear that Olympus made a lot of missteps well before this, and coupled with the downturn in camera sales because of smartphones and then the pandemic, the money just wasn't there any more. 

But here, perhaps, we come to the nub of the problem. Its often-bizarre product-line decisions were just the visible tip of an iceberg of corporate mismanagement that hit the world’s headlines in 2011 with a major financial scandal in which eye-watering losses of over £1 billion were revealed. Add to this the fact that the camera division is only a small part of a much larger business for which the main focus is the lucrative medical equipment sector, and you can see how things might have gone wrong.

With any luck the new owners of the Olympus brand will be blessed with much better management. It will clearly need to slash costs but hopefully not in its R&D department, where it has a talented team who have introduced some great innovations over the years, from live view, to dust reduction to a hand in the mirrorless camera itself.

The important thing to emphasise here is that the new owner clearly sees a future for the brand, and I see nothing in this announcement to stop you from buying into the Olympus system, if you were planning to, or to jump ship if you’re already an Olympus user.  It would be tragic if Olympus were to go the way of Pentax, a brand with a once proud heritage that now exists in name only and is more associated with spectacles than cameras.

BTW, if you are into photography, do try to seek out Amateur Photographer. It's one of the few weekly camera and photography magazines around, and it's full of great and inspiring photography as well as informative articles on camera gear and photographic technique. If your library offers Press Reader, you can find it there.