Nikkei Business published an interview with Shigeki Ishizuka, former vice chairman of the Sony Group. The one interesting bit is that he said this:

• There was already a group ahead of us in the mirrorless camera market, and we received an invitation to collaborate, but after much discussion within the company, we declined. We decided to pursue our own unique approach to mirrorless cameras. We wanted to create a compact mirrorless camera that was distinctly Sony.

Back in early 2010, the leader in this segment was the Micro Four Thirds group with Olympus and Panasonic. So it’s a good guess to assume this was the possible collaboration. Instead they preferred to go their own route:

• Releasing a model similar to those of other companies would simply lead to price competition. We had to differentiate ourselves thoroughly. We stuck to the principle of “maximizing the difference.” As the person in charge of digital cameras, I pursued that relentlessly from around 2010 onwards.

The interesting part is that initially they thought mirrorless would sell simply because of the smaller size. But this wasn’t correct:

• Sony’s traditional approach was to think, “It’s a good product made in a small size, so it should sell,” but they didn’t quite succeed. It was a product-out approach. In the world of digital cameras, they created what they wanted, thinking, “This kind of camera should sell,” but it hardly sold and became a failure. It’s a collection of such failures.

So they made a new plan in 2013:

• Reflecting on their product-out approach, they launched a new project in 2013 with the goal of becoming the market leader in five years, and achieved it in 2018. They thoroughly implemented both product-out and market-in strategies, rebuilding their business as a consistent whole, including development, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and even after-sales service. They visited retailers, asking them to stock their products, listened to customer feedback to improve performance, and expanded their product lineup. They did this every year. Once things started to move in a positive direction, sales grew rapidly.

Where they made the most money:

• The most profitable business was the interchangeable lenses. Establishing that as a viable business model was the most important, difficult, and interesting part. We also worked on improving the autofocus speed, which was our biggest weakness. Around 2016, when we overcame that and improved image quality, we felt we had overcome a major hurdle to sales.

Now we have an interesting insight about Sony’s strategy in the first decade of their mirrorless adventure. Would love to know exactly what the plan is for the next decade. From what I heard, CINE/Video is going to be their main focus with the implementation of a new generation of sensors we are going to see from 2027 onwards ;)

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via Digicameinfo